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: AFP
Feb 14, 2011
Thailand and Cambodia both claimed vindication Tuesday after the UN appealed for a permanent ceasefire in their deadly border dispute, showing no sign of bridging differences over how to end the rift.
Thailand urged its neighbour to return to the table for bilateral talks to settle the row centred on a 900-year-old temple, which erupted into four days of clashes earlier this month, leaving at least 10 people dead.
The two sides are at odds over a border area surrounding
Source: BBC
Feb 14, 2011
Apprentice engineers look set to help a father and son restore an 80-year-old ice-breaker tug whose wake on Loch Ness was mistaken for Nessie.
James Clark, a former skipper of the Scot II, and his son Dan have started a project to save the rusting vessel.
The duo from Fort Augustus have been offered assistance from Babcock apprentices and staff and students at Fife's Carnegie College.
The cost of the full restoration has been estimated at £375,000.
Source: NYT
Feb 14, 2011
Lucy may well be the world’s most famous fossil hominid. She is the best-known specimen of the species Australopithecus afarensis, and her partial skeleton, found in 1974, revealed that she and her kin could walk upright....
Now, a fossilized foot bone from Hadar, Ethiopia, reveals that A. afarensis had arched feet, as do modern humans, and was fully committed to walking upright. The species lived between 3.7 million and 2.9 million years ago....
Source: NYT
Feb 14, 2011
Anthony Giacchino thumbed through a stack of letters, all of them marked with yellow stickers, red stamps or a simple, final X slashed through the addressee’s names: Clotilde Terranova. Rosie Friedman. Rosaria, Lucia and Catherine Maltese. “Return to sender,” he said. “Return. Return. Return. It’s like, ‘Who is this person?’ They’re forgotten, and unfortunately there’s a lot of truth to that.”
Dead letters? Not to Mr. Giacchino, who thinks of them more as correspondence with anothe
Source: NYT
Feb 14, 2011
There was trepidation on both sides when a squadron of biologists set out to celebrate Darwin Day in rural America during the weekend.
The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, N.C., which instigated the road trip in the name of scientific outreach, first held a workshop where seven of its Ph.D.’s staged role-playing games and practiced debunking misconceptions about evolution without sounding confrontational.
The group’s small-town hosts took their own prec
Source: NYT
Feb 14, 2011
SANDTON, South Africa — Kenny Kunene, a former gangster turned businessman, gave what he called “the mother of all parties” for his 40th birthday. With his small paunch protruding from a white tuxedo and his eyes hidden behind Roberto Cavalli sunglasses, he ate sushi from the belly of a woman who was wearing nothing but black lingerie and high heels while hundreds of guests looked on.
Mr. Kunene, who says he supports the A.N.C.’s Youth League with his time and money, promptly retor
Source: The Washington Post
Feb 14, 2011
One day more than two centuries ago, a Maryland slave of West African descent took a smooth stone he had probably found in a ploughed field and slid it between the bricks of a furnace he was building.
The slave might have believed, as West Africa's Yoruba culture held, that such stones had connections to Eshu-Elegba, the deity of fortune, and were left behind like mystical calling cards after a lightning strike.
The bond servant sealed the stone into the brickwork, wher
Source: Live Science
Feb 14, 2011
Two false mummy toes from Egypt may have actually strutted their stuff as functional big-toe prostheses for their owners, researchers have found.
The two toes — the Greville Chester housed in the British Museum and the Cairo toe at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo — date back to before 600 B.C., which the researchers say is much earlier than what had been considered the earliest known practical prosthesis (called the Roman Capua leg dating to around 300 B.C.)
The Greville C
Source: BBC
Feb 14, 2011
Scientists have identified why the bright yellows in some of Vincent van Gogh's paintings have turned brown.
A complex chemical reaction is behind the deterioration of the works.
The finding is a first step to understanding how to stop some of the Dutch master's most famous paintings from fading over time.
The results, published in the journal Analytical Chemistry, suggest shielding the affected paintings as much as possible from UV and sunlight.
Source: BBC
Feb 14, 2011
The film The King's Speech continues to pick up plaudits for its account of George VI's struggle with his stammer.
But less widely known is the role of a mid Wales village in tackling another of the future monarch's afflictions.
The then Prince Albert sought refuge for three weeks in Llangurig, Powys, while recuperating from a duodenal ulcer.
He rested in the village in September 1917, shortly after serving in the Battle of Jutland during World War I.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 14, 2011
The man topping the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's most-wanted Nazi list has been charged by Hungarian prosecutors for war crimes related to the massacre of hundreds of people in wartime Yugoslavia.
Hungarian Sandor Kepiro, now 97, was charged with being "complicit in the execution of four innocent civilians in the town of Novi Sad between 21 and 23 January, 1942, as the commander of a patrol".
An estimated 1,200 Jews, gipsies and Serbs died in the massacre that w
Source: CNN
Feb 14, 2011
The Mississippi NAACP has called on Governor Haley Barbour to publicly denounce an attempt by a Confederacy group to honor a Ku Klux Klan leader, the organization said Monday.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans has launched the campaign to recognize Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest on a specialty license plate.
Forrest, a popular and controversial figure, is best known as a leader of the KKK, the white supremacist group known for terrorizing blacks in the South aft
Source: Fox News
Feb 14, 2011
Two false mummy toes from Egypt may have actually strutted their stuff as functional big-toe prostheses for their owners, researchers have found.
The two toes — the Greville Chester housed in the British Museum and the Cairo toe at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo — date back to before 600 B.C., which the researchers say is much earlier than what had been considered the earliest known practical prosthesis (called the Roman Capua leg dating to around 300 B.C.).
"We may
Source: Polskie Radio
Feb 14, 2011
The late Marek Edelman, one of the three commanders of the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto Uprising in 1943 and a prominent dissident during the communist period, is to have his mini-museum dedicated to him in his home town of Lodz, central Poland.
The City Council has approved a plan to set aside a small section of the Historical Museum and arrange it as Edelman’s apartment, with the furniture, books, photographs and objects of everyday use recreating the atmosphere of his home inLodz .
Source: AP
Feb 14, 2011
Investigators in central Kentucky are probing the theft of multiple Civil War antiques, including belt buckles, arrowheads and old money, from a store.
Boyle County Sheriff's Chief Deputy Jim Wilcher said whoever broke into Merchants Row Cafe and Antiques in Perryville seemed to know what they were looking for.
Wilcher told WKYT-TV in Lexington that because of the number of items stolen, it is likely more than one person took part in the burglary on Saturday.
Source: BBC News
Feb 14, 2011
US marine archaeologists have found the sunken whaling ship belonging to the captain who inspired Herman Melville's classic 19th Century novel, Moby Dick.
The remains of the vessel, the Two Brothers, was found in shallow waters off Hawaii.
Captain George Pollard was the skipper when the ship hit a coral reef and sank in 1823.
His previous ship, the Essex, had been rammed by a whale and also sank, providing the narrative for the book.
'Pretty amazing'
Source: BBC News
Feb 14, 2011
Hungarian prosecutors have charged former military officer Sandor Kepiro with a notorious 1942 massacre in the Serbian city of Novi Sad.
More than 1,200 Jewish, Serb and Roma civilians were murdered in the wartime raid, led by Hungarian forces.
Mr Kepiro is top of a list of most wanted Nazis compiled by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
He said he was "nowhere near the executions" and was "the only one who objected to the orders".
Source: BBC News
Feb 14, 2011
Ancient Britain was a peninsula until a tsunami flooded its land-links to Europe some 8,000 years ago. Did that wave help shape the national character?
The coastline and landscape of what would become modern Britain began to emerge at the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 years ago.
What had been a cold, dry tundra on the north-western edge of Europe grew warmer and wetter as the ice caps melted. The Irish Sea, North Sea and the Channel were all dry land, albeit it
Source: NYT
Feb 13, 2011
SPOKANE, Wash. — The bomb was sophisticated and potentially deadly, but it did not detonate. No one was hurt, and no one has been arrested. So Spokane became a mystery.
“To me, it’s that God’s gracious hand moved,” said Chief Anne Kirkpatrick of the Spokane Police Department. “This was a bomb of significance that would have caused devastation.”
Nearly a month after a cleanup crew found the live bomb along the planned route of a large downtown march honoring the Rev. Dr.
Source: BBC News
Feb 13, 2011
Love it or hate it, even the most hardened anti-Romeo will be hard pressed to avoid Valentine's Day this year. But as an exhibit at the British Library currently on show is testament to, there is a first for everything - even on Valentine's Day.
It is a letter, written from a young woman to her love, and is the first mention of the word Valentine in the English language. And, for the first time, the descendants of Margery Brews and her betrothed John Paston have been traced.
