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: BBC
Oct 26, 2010
A new book in South Africa says a computer hacker tried to sabotage the historic election in 1994.
This was the vote which ended apartheid and brought Nelson Mandela to power.
The book by Peter Harris, who was the head of the official election monitoring division, says the hacker got into what was thought to be an impregnable system.
The manipulation was detected at the time, but the culprit was never discovered....
Source: BBC
Oct 26, 2010
A collection of Ivor the Engine episodes which have not been seen since the 1960s have been unearthed in Kent.
The 24 reels were found at the back of the converted pigshed in Blean, Kent, where Peter Firmin and Oliver Postgate created their much-loved films.
Postgate, who died in 2008, and Firmin were also behind other favourites including Bagpuss and The Clangers.
He said the black and white episodes were discovered by an agency that was digitising his fat
Source: AP
Oct 26, 2010
Saddam Hussein's longtime foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, was sentenced to death by hanging Tuesday for persecuting members of Shiite religious parties under the former regime.
Iraqi High Tribunal spokesman Mohammed Abdul-Sahib did not say when Aziz, 74, would be put to death.
Aziz has 30 days to launch an appeal. If the Appeals' Court upholds the death sentence, the law says Aziz should be hung within 30 days of the final decision. The Iraqi president also needs to sign
Source: AP
Oct 26, 2010
Authorities in Bosnia and Serbia said Tuesday they had recovered the skeletal remains of at least 97 people from the banks of a border lake that was partially drained this summer for maintenance.
Officials from the Bosnian and Serbian Commissions for Missing Persons said 372 bone fragments were found on the Bosnian bank of Perucac lake and 79 on the Serbian side.
By counting the right femurs recovered, experts determined the bones belonged to at least 97 people -- victi
Source: CNN
Oct 26, 2010
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was a binge drinker who had a pornography habit or fetish in the 1980s, then changed radically when he stopped drinking alcohol, his former girlfriend told CNN on Monday.
Lillian McEwen, who dated Thomas for several years before he was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1991, provided CNN's "Larry King Live" program with a harsh depiction of Thomas. She said when they first met, he might have been a "raving alcoholic" who used
Source: CNN
Oct 26, 2010
Just imagine: a world without cancer. It's a tantalizing thought, recently floated by researchers at Manchester University in the UK.
That world may well have existed, but in the distant past, according to their survey of hundreds of mummies from Egypt and South America. The researchers found that only one mummy had clearly identifiable signs of cancer.
The study suggested that industrialization, pollution and the ills of modern life are to blame for the epidemic of can
Source: Boston Globe
Oct 26, 2010
GREAT BARRINGTON — Hunched over a pair of hazy photos, Emily Wagner maneuvers a tiny spatula to rearrange the torn and furrowed film that shows the chest X-ray of a missing Korean War soldier.
It’s slow, painstaking work in a converted cotton mill in the Berkshires, but the payoff could be immeasurable. By putting its film-restoration skills to new use, a photo laboratory here is in the vanguard of a promising Defense Department effort to identify the remains of Korean War veterans,
Source: Virginia Gazette
Oct 26, 2010
WILLIAMSBURG – The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation has acquired a British military flag that served as the King’s Color for the 96th Regiment of Foot during the era of the French & Indian War.
Measuring 5 1/2 feet by 6 1/2 feet, the silk standard is constructed of 12 white, 8 blue and 3 red pieces, forming a Union flag of the type in use 1707-1800. The center of the flag is embroidered with a Union wreath of roses and thistles, signifying the union of England and Scotland, and
Source: Southern Poverty Law Center
Oct 26, 2010
The Founding Fathers as white racist poster boys?Do a Facebook page search of the name Thomas Jefferson, and the very first listing that will appear is Thomas Jefferson – American. You can click to join 11,753 people who “like” the page.Well, congratulations. You just signed onto fan pages sponsored by the racist National Policy Institute (NPI
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 26, 2010
The discovery of a trove of insects preserved in amber raises new questions about whether India was always part of the Asian continent, researchers said in a study published on Monday.
The insects – bees, termites, spiders, and flies – had been entombed in the vast Cambay deposit in western India for some 50 million years.
Scientists had long assumed that India was for a time an isolated island-continent, and consequently expected that the insects found in the amber w
Source: Yale Alumni Mag
Oct 25, 2010
Peru is considering “criminally denouncing” Yale officials in a long-running dispute over Machu Picchu artifacts, a government minister said this weekend.
Peru has sued Yale over the artifacts, which Yale archeologist Hiram Bingham ’98 took – with government permission — from the ancient Incan ruins in 1911. The South American country plans a centennial celebration of Machu Picchu’s rediscovery for next July, and has demanded the items’ return before then.
Now Peruvian
Source: Minnesota Public Radio
Oct 25, 2010
It started with a fingerprint of a 25-year-old college professor who opposed the Vietnam War and ended with a search for his remains, 32 years later, in a wooded area near Eveleth, Minn.
The FBI's files on Paul and Sheila Wellstone, many of which are being made public for the first time, shed new light on the extent of the relationship between the FBI and the political activist who would go on to become a U.S. senator from Minnesota.
Some of the information uncovered in
Source: Yale Alumni Magazine
Oct 25, 2010
Peru is considering “criminally denouncing” Yale officials in a long-running dispute over Machu Picchu artifacts, a government minister said this weekend.
Peru has sued Yale over the artifacts, which Yale archeologist Hiram Bingham ’98 took – with government permission — from the ancient Incan ruins in 1911. The South American country plans a centennial celebration of Machu Picchu’s rediscovery for next July, and has demanded the items’ return before then.
The universi
Source: AL
Oct 25, 2010
When an oil boom at Perdido Pass accidentally snagged a 19th century anchor last month, Doug Wilson was on the dock when the anchor was unloaded.
An archaeologist at the Fort Vancouver National Historic Preserve, Wilson was working a two-week stint at the BP Joint Command Center during the oil spill crisis helping protect historical sites in the Gulf of Mexico and on beaches. As an archaeologist with some expertise in Civil War relics, he wanted to see the anchor.
Marit
Source: National Geographic
Oct 25, 2010
A fossil human jawbone discovered in southern China is upsetting conventional notions of when our ancestors migrated out of Africa.
The mandible, unearthed by paleontologists in China's Zhiren Cave in 2007, sports a distinctly modern feature: a prominent chin. But the bone is undeniably 60,000 years older than the next oldest Homo sapiens remains in China, scientists say.
In fact, at about a hundred thousand years old, the Chinese fossil is "the oldest modern human
Source: Discovery News
Oct 25, 2010
Early modern humans mated with Neanderthals and possibly other archaic hominid species from Asia at least 100,000 years ago, according to a new study that describes human remains from that period in South China.
The remains are the oldest modern human fossils in East Asia and predate, by over 60,000 years, the oldest previously known modern human remains in the region.
The fossils — a chin and related teeth — belonged to a modern human that also featured more robust Ne
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Oct 25, 2010
Archaeologist Bill Kelso and his team were digging this summer in a previously unexplored section of the fort at Jamestown, Va., the country's oldest permanent English colony, when they uncovered a series of deep holes. They believe the holes once anchored heavy, timber columns supporting the fort's first church, known to have been built in 1608 and the place where Pocahontas got married in 1614.
The church's exact location had bedeviled Jamestown scholars for years. Records say it
Source: Fox News
Oct 25, 2010
Skeletons unearthed in a cemetery may have cleared Christopher Columbus as the original transatlantic vector of syphilis.
It's been popularly theorized among experts in tropical diseases that the explorer brought back one too many treasures from the New World, including the potentially fatal sexually transmitted infection. Soon after his return in the mid-1490s, a pandemic of the disease erupted in Europe.
However, the largest excavation of skeletons undertaken in Brita
Source: Discovery News
Oct 25, 2010
A modern human fossil dating to more than 100,000 years ago in Asia reveals distinctive Neanderthal features.
Early modern humans mated with Neanderthals and possibly other archaic hominid species from Asia at least 100,000 years ago, according to a new study that describes human remains from that period in South China.
The remains are the oldest modern human fossils in East Asia and predate, by over 60,000 years, the oldest previously known modern human remains in the
Source: Discovery News
Oct 25, 2010
Dating back to the French Revolution, this gourd is thought to contain the blood of Louis XVI, collected shortly after he was executed.
The research, accepted for publication in the journal Forensic Science International: Genetics, shows how genetic analysis can provide new historical evidence independent of other traditional sources of information.
The gourd, originally used to store gunpowder, was extensively decorated on the outside with a flame tool. Burned into its
