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: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 17, 2010
An international team of scientists has begun drilling deep below the Dead Sea in an effort to extract material that could provide an unusual look at Earth's history over the past 500,000 years.
The project aims to examine the layers of sediment left behind beneath the lowest place on Earth over the course of millions of years, providing clues about shifting weather patterns, seismic activity and climate change.
"The sediments ... provide an 'archive' on the envir
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 17, 2010
Russia must regain its pre-revolutionary status as the country with the best lavatories in the world, an official said on Wednesday, lamenting the current state of the country's lavatories.
"Before the revolution of 1917 the quality of lavatories in Russia was the best of the world," Vladimir Moksunov, head of the Russian association of lavatory manufacturers, told reporters....
Source: NYT
Nov 17, 2010
JOHANNESBURG — When he was only in his 20s Ernest Cole, a black photographer who stood barely five feet tall, created one of the most harrowing pictorial records of what it was like to be black in apartheid South Africa. He went into exile in 1966, and the next year his work was published in the United States in a book, “House of Bondage,” but his photographs were banned in his homeland where he and his work have remained little known.
In exile Mr. Cole’s life crumbled. For much of
Source: CNN.com
Nov 17, 2010
London, England (CNN) -- News of Britain's next royal wedding was on the front page of every British paper Wednesday, but so were mentions of the late Princess Diana.
The day after Prince William announced he had proposed to his longtime girlfriend, Kate Middleton, tabloids carried full-page pictures of the couple and broadsheets ran large, above-the-fold headlines.
"We got there in the end, darling!" was the headline on the Daily Mail. "(And it's sealed
Source: CNN Money
Nov 17, 2010
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Consumer prices for everything other than food and energy are rising, but at a rate so sluggish, it's the smallest price increase on record, the government said Wednesday.
The Consumer Price Index, a key measure of inflation, increased 1.2% over the past 12 months ending in October, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said.
But after stripping out volatile food and energy prices, the more closely watched core CPI rose 0.6% on an annual basis -- the
Source: Fox News
Nov 17, 2010
Relics from the tomb of the medieval English King Richard II have been found by an archivist researching the papers of the National Portrait Gallery's first director George Scharf, the London gallery said on Tuesday.
Among hundreds of diaries and notebooks left in boxes not opened for years were contents from the coffin of the ill-fated monarch and sketches of his skull and bones.
The contents of a cigarette box dated August 31, 1871 were only identified as relics from
Source: National Parks Traveler
Nov 17, 2010
National Park Service officials seem to be back at square one in their deliberations over how best to utilize historic officers' quarters at Fort Hancock at Gateway National Recreation Area in New Jersey.
While there had been plans by a developer to transform three dozen of the buildings into a range of commercial establishments -- bed-and-breakfasts, restaurants, conference facilities -- that vision collapsed for lack of sound financing. In October 2009 top Park Service officials d
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 17, 2010
Veuve Clicquot, the champagne maker, says at least three bottles of its brand were found in a two-centuries old shipwreck in the Baltic Sea.
The divers who found the sunken vessel in July said the Champagne is thought to be the world's oldest drinkable bubbly. They were not able to determine the brand at the time.
But Veuve Clicquot said Wednesday that experts checking branding of the corks "were able to identify with absolute certainty" that three of the bott
Source: BBC News
Nov 17, 2010
The Louvre Museum, in Paris, is appealing to the public to help raise 1m euro (£630,000) to keep a 16th Century oil painting in France.
Owners of The Three Graces, by German Lucas Cranach the Elder, have agreed to sell for 4m euros (£2.5m) to the Louvre which has so far raised 3m (£1.9m).
The museum said it was "an exceptional piece which needs to be part of the national collection".
The Louvre has until 31 January to raise cash before it goes on
Source: BBC News
Nov 17, 2010
Serbia has asked Interpol to help find war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic, according to Tanjug news agency.
The Serbian Interior Minister, Ivica Dacic, met Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble in France on Tuesday.
Interpol may be able to determine whether Mladic "is in Serbia or in some other countries, members of Interpol", Tanjug quoted the minister as saying.
Mladic has been indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal on charges of genocide and oth
Source: Jewish Telegraph Agency
Nov 16, 2010
(JTA) -- The Simon Wiesenthal Center has called on President Obama to release a 2006 Justice Department report disclosing that the U.S. government provided a safe haven for Nazi war criminals.
The New York Times on Nov. 12 reported on the 600-page report, posted on the newspaper's website, which says that the U.S. government provided a safe haven for Nazis and detailed the government's effort to bring some alleged Nazi war criminals to justice.
“The Simon Wiesenthal Cen
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 16, 2010
The Kremlin is considering pushing ahead with the biggest geographical redistribution of its population since Josef Stalin's forced deportations of entire nationalities in the 1940s.
Under the plans, which were leaked to the daily Vedomosti newspaper, the majority of Russia's 141 million-strong population would be concentrated in just twenty urban centres rather than sparsely spread out over one fifth of the earth's surface as is now the case.
At the moment, ninety per
Source: NYT
Nov 16, 2010
DALLAS — With the turn of a shovel and a few turns of phrase, former President George W. Bush culminated an elaborately orchestrated return to the public stage on Tuesday with a presidential library groundbreaking and a reunion with former Vice President Dick Cheney.
In a rare public appearance since a long hospital stay earlier this year, former Vice President Dick Cheney appeared much thinner.
In their first public appearance together since leaving office, Mr. Bush an
Source: NYT
Nov 16, 2010
LOS ANGELES — Three months after the mummified corpses of two infants were found wrapped in 1930s newspapers in a basement steamer trunk here, the police said DNA evidence showed them to be the children of a Scottish-born nurse who owned the trunk and lived in the building during that time.
Janet Mann Barrie, the babies’ mother, died in Canada at age 97 in 1994.
Autopsies revealed no signs of trauma, and on Tuesday the police said they had closed the case. But lingerin
Source: The Guardian (UK)
Nov 16, 2010
Masons' marks may be an ancient tradition, but academics find they could have plenty of modern uses.
It's the flat-pack furniture problem that almost all of us have faced. You open the box, trawl through its contents, lay everything out, then cross-reference the instructions. You look at them every which way since they appear to be in Sanskrit, then have a go, and feel like you've done a decent job. Only then, disaster strikes. You turn around and see an extra three pieces of your f
Source: Scotsman
Nov 16, 2010
AN ALMOST intact human skull which may date back 5,000 years has been exhumed from a tomb in South Ronaldsay in Orkney.
The burial chamber containing a collection of bones was discovered by boat owner Hamish Mowatt, who caught a glimpse inside the tomb in September, when he was tidying the garden of a bistro owned by his fiancée, Carole Fletcher.
Archeologists believe the layout of the newly uncovered tomb may shed light on the rituals and beliefs of our neolithic ances
Source: London Evening Standard
Nov 16, 2010
Remains of a Roman village have been discovered only half a metre below the ground in west London.
The site has remained undisturbed partly because it lies in the Grade I listed Syon Park and has been protected against ploughing in recent centuries. But it might never have come to light without plans to build a new Waldorf Astoria Hotel.
The hotel now plans to incorporate some of its Roman heritage into the finished building.
Archaeologists from the Museum
Source: BBC
Nov 16, 2010
Remains of an 18th Century French frigate blamed for attacking British merchant ships have been found about 60 miles off the Devon coast.
A team from US marine archaeology firm Odyssey Marine Exploration found the wreck of La Marquise de Tourny.
It is believed to be the first privateer found off the UK, a type of ship authorised to seize enemy cargo.
The material goes into Odyssey's own collection and will be displayed on its website or lent to museums.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 16, 2010
The first Americans reached Europe five centuries before Christopher Columbus "discovered" the New World, according to claims made by a Spanish university team.
Scientists tracing the genetic origins of an Icelandic family believe the first American arrived in Europe around the 10th century, a full five hundred years before Columbus set off on his first voyage of discovery in 1492.
Norse sagas suggest the Vikings discovered the Americas centuries before Colum
Source: AP
Nov 16, 2010
WASHINGTON – Ambushed in Afghanistan, Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta stepped into a "wall of bullets" and chased down two Taliban fighters who were carrying his mortally wounded friend away.
Three years after that act of battlefield bravery, Giunta on Tuesday became the first living service member from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars to receive the nation's top military award, the Medal of Honor.
Far from the perilous ridge where his unit was attacked on a moonlit
