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: Press Connects
Aug 26, 2010
The 18 gravesites in the Thomas Cemetery are now being excavated by archaeologists from Binghamton University.
The oldest grave in the cemetery along Route 12A, according to tombstone dates, is 1842; the most recent is dated 1917, Versaggi said.
The developer of a Price Chopper grocery next door to the cemetery engaged the services of BU's Public Archaeology and the Thomas J. Shea Funeral Home Inc. to oversee exhumation of the bodies and eventual reburial.
Source: BBC
Aug 26, 2010
Researchers in South Africa have revealed the earliest direct evidence of human-made arrows.
The scientists unearthed 64,000 year-old "stone points", which they say were probably arrow heads.
Closer inspection of the ancient weapons revealed remnants of blood and bone that provided clues about how they were used.
The team reports its findings in the journal Antiquity.
The arrow heads were excavated from layers of ancient sediment
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 26, 2010
A planned statue of the colonial explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley in his home town should be scrapped because it wrongly romanticises his “racist” African adventures, a group of opponents have claimed in a letter to the Daily Telegraph.
Residents of Denbigh, North Wales have commissioned a bronze statue to celebrate the Victorian explorer’s legacy – but 60 academics, authors and campaigners have called for the plan to be abandoned.
But the campaigners claim his exped
Source: Top News (UK)
Aug 26, 2010
Archaeologists have unearthed a Roman industrial estate in North Yorkshire which might once was used by the Roman Ninth Hispanic legion.
The site, which includes remains of a water-powered flour mill, clothes, food remains, pottery and graves, has been linked to a known imperial fort at Healam Bridge built by the Romans around 2,000 years ago.
The industrial area was comprised of a series of huge timber buildings, typically on the north side of a beck, which powered the
Source: AP
Aug 26, 2010
LURGAN, Northern Ireland – Bursts of laughter. Young men playing ping pong. Battles of the bands.
In a Northern Ireland determined to put conflict behind it, the Links teen center bridges the divide between Catholic and Protestant teens in this struggling town, giving them something to do, an alternative to streets that offer a toxic mix of drugs and violence. It's working, but like the peace process itself, it is under strain amid looming budget cuts.
"We're just
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 26, 2010
Archaeological remains dating back to the last Ice Age have been found during work to upgrade a major road, the Highways Agency said.
The remains, along with Iron Age and Roman settlements, were uncovered during work to upgrade the A46 between Newark and Widmerpool in Nottinghamshire.
The Highways Agency said the finds included ancient flint tools and flint knapping debris dating back to about 11,000 BC - around the end of the last Ice Age when Stone Age hunter-gathers
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 26, 2010
The boffins of Bletchley cut their teeth on the Telegraph crossword, says Sinclair McKay.
"We were very good at crosswords," says one of the veteran codebreakers of Bletchley Park, ''and also anything to do with anagrams. And of course Scrabble.”
When I wrote my book The Secret Life of Bletchley Park I interviewed brilliant men and women – mathematicians, linguists, debutantes – who had smashed the German Enigma codes in the Second World War. I found that the
Source: LA Times
Aug 26, 2010
Go back, through a universe of chalk dust and repeating bells, to a classroom outfitted with a line of squat stoves, a long table stacked with dry goods, a row of teenage girls mixing dough in dented bowls, writing down the equation of a good pie in notebooks tracked by ink and flour. It was 1980, and my freshman high school class was taking home economics, learning how to make a pot of stew, set a proper dinner table, bake and frost a cake, as the last months of the Carter administration clicke
Source: Washington Post
Aug 26, 2010
...Last week, in the midst of a summer-long archaeological dig, experts using surface-penetrating radar found what are believed to be remnants of two cabins that once made up the small slave village that served L'Hermitage.
And the National Park Service says the find adds another page to the story of the mysterious plantation, whose tropical-influenced main house still stands, an unlikely witness near the banks of the Monocacy, more than 200 years after it was built.
Source: USA Today
Aug 26, 2010
Bird calls ring from the forest, echoing amid the crumbling ruins whose darkened doorways have long beckoned explorers and scholars.
The Maya ancients who built the ruins of Kiuic (kee-week) here fled those doorways in a hurry, an international archaeology team now realizes. Left behind may be frozen-in-time clues to the fabled collapse of their civilization.
Archaeologists have explored Kiuic's ruins for more than a century, but working since 2000, Bey and colleagues a
Source: BBC
Aug 26, 2010
A glamorous Nazi spy may have been behind one of the biggest setbacks suffered by Allied forces during World War II, newly released files suggest.
The secret government papers suggest that Marina Lee, a blonde ballerina, stole battle plans which led to the fall of Norway to Germany in 1940.
According to the files, Germany was close to pulling out of Norway before Lee passed on details of the plan.
The documents were part of an archive released by British sp
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 26, 2010
The prehistoric hunter known as Oetzi the Iceman may have been ceremonially buried on a high Alpine pass rather than killed there in a deadly ambush, experts say.
Researchers believe they have found evidence which shows that Oetzi, named after the Oetz Valley in which he was found, died lower down the valley, probably violently, but was then carried up to the 10,500ft high pass for a ceremonial burial.
The new theory suggests that he may have been an important figure
Source: AP
Aug 26, 2010
A museum official says a bush fire has destroyed the historic site of the encampment of 19th Century warrior King Lobengula in western Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe's National Museums and Monuments director Godfrey Mahachi says strong winds swept the fire through the five acre (two hectare) national heritage site, destroying all eight beehive hut structures, including the king's palace, and a palisade of wooden fortifications.
Lobengula's tribal capital was rebuilt as a symbolic n
Source: AP
Aug 26, 2010
Former South African President Nelson Mandela's home was bugged during a tumultuous period for his African National Congress party, a prominent labor leader said Thursday.
Zwelinzima Vavi, general secretary of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, said Mandela told him that listening devices were placed in his Johannesburg home, where ANC leaders would come seeking his advice.
Mandela's house was bugged in 2007 during the buildup to an ANC conference at which Pres
Source: AP
Aug 26, 2010
The Auschwitz memorial in Poland says it has obtained around 150 medical instruments believed to have been used by the Nazis in experiments on the death camp inmates.
Memorial spokesman Bartosz Bartyzel said Thursday the gynecological and surgical instruments were recently offered to the museum by a historian who acquired them from a family that found them shortly after World War II at their house, which was located on the former camp grounds.
Bartyzel says given where
Source: CNN
Aug 26, 2010
A solemn Mass at the Missionaries of Charity in Kolkata, India, marked the 100th anniversary of Mother Teresa's birth on Thursday.
People from all walks of life gathered at the global headquarters of the order of nuns, which Mother Teresa founded 60 years ago.
Mother Teresa was born as Agnes Gonxha Boiaxhiu to ethnic Albanian parents in Skopje, Macedonia, on August 26, 1910.
She arrived in India in 1929 and dedicated her life to help those in need. She rec
Source: Tablet
Aug 26, 2010
Russia’s great expanse stretches south from the Arctic for many thousands of miles until it comes to a halt at the long spine of the Greater Caucasus Mountains. The republics on the northern side of the Caucasus, including turbulent Dagestan and Chechnya, still belong to Russia. Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia, on the southern side of the mountains, gained their independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s. The high slopes are home to shepherds and the descendants of clans wh
Source: Civil War Preservation Trust
Aug 26, 2010
Today a coalition of preservation groups working with local business owners involved in Businesses Against the Casino released an independent assessment of the potential impacts of gaming on Gettysburg and Adams County. The report, Impacts of the Proposed Mason-Dixon Casino on the Gettysburg Area – A Realistic Assessment, found that the application for a resort casino license near Gettysburg greatly exaggerates the economic impact of the proposal and ignores the “serious, substantial and sustai
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 26, 2010
A politician tipped as a future Japanese prime minister has said the British are not very likeable, but admitted the way British prisoners marched in The Bridge on the River Kwai demonstrated their best qualities.
Ichiro Ozawa, the former secretary-general of Japan’s ruling Democratic Party, also said he values US democracy but dismissed the American people as “simple-minded”.
The 68-year-old veteran politician, who resigned as the second most important official in the
Source: AP
Aug 26, 2010
CALCUTTA, India – Hundreds of nuns, bishops and volunteers attended a Mass on Thursday marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Mother Teresa, the selfless nun who dedicated her life to serving the sick and poor in India.
School children, tourists and volunteers, some carrying bunches of flowers or candles, also crowded Mother Teresa's grave in the headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity, the order of nuns she founded in 1950 in the eastern Indian city of Calcutta....
