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: AP
Jul 7, 2010
Israel's antiquities agency says workers found a century-old hand grenade in Jerusalem's Old City.
The Israel Antiquities Authority says workers doing restoration at the city's historic stone walls were digging through crushed stone when they found a "fist-sized chunk of metal."
The antiquities agency said on Wednesday the workers concluded it was a grenade hidden there about 100 years ago....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 7, 2010
The Queen placed a wreath on the site of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in her first visit to New York City in more than 30 years.
The monarch, 84, braved 100F (38C) heat to pay respects at Ground Zero near the footprint of the World Trade Center's south tower.
She wore a straw hat and pastel-colored long-sleeved dress while greeting victims' family members and first responders....
Source: NYT
Jul 7, 2010
In his barbershop on Church Street here, 78-year-old Sam Johnson can close his eyes and dance once more as a teenager inside the cracker box Emerson Street branch of the Y.M.C.A.
“Oh, the music, the ballgames,” said Mr. Johnson, who also remembers scraped knees, games of checkers and first kisses. “It was the place to be.”
The place not to be, for Mr. Johnson and other blacks in the 1950s, was the main branch of the Y.M.C.A. in this lakefront Chicago suburb. Even in Eva
Source: LA Times
Jul 7, 2010
The Mexican media conglomerate Televisa employs actors in blackface during a popular morning program on the World Cup, underscoring once more the conflicting attitudes held by Mexico and the United States about race and racism. Tracy Wilkinson writes in The Times:
Source: NYT
Jul 7, 2010
You can find just about anything on the sidewalks of New York, so when John Lankenau happened upon a tombstone while walking his dog one night a few years ago, he took his grim discovery in stride. Then he did what any self-respecting citizen would do: He carted the two-and-a-half-foot-high granite marker, home for safe-keeping.
The tombstone, which John Lankenau found leaning against a fire hydrant in Manhattan, cited the year — 1910 — that Hinda Amchanitzky died.
“I d
Source: Houston Chronicle
Jul 7, 2010
Those gooey dime- and quarter-size tar balls washing up in the Texas surf last weekend bore more than just an ugly reminder of the catastrophic oil gushing into the northern Gulf of Mexico.
Tar balls carry a biological legacy of the algae, plants and marine life that died and, over millions of years, formed oil. And this particular oil has much to tell us about the hot, dry and salty origins of the Gulf.
"With each bit of oil you have a window into the chemistry of
Source: BBC News
Jul 7, 2010
Researchers have discovered stone tools in Norfolk, UK, that suggest that early humans arrived in Britain nearly a million years ago - or even earlier.
The find, published in the journal Nature, pushes back the arrival of the first humans in what is now the UK by several hundred thousand years.
Environmental data suggests that temperatures were relatively cool.
This raises the possibility that these early Britons may have been among the first humans to use
Source: WaPo
Jul 7, 2010
When Queen Elizabeth II first visited New York City, in 1957, the glamorous young monarch was welcomed with a ticker-tape parade befitting war heroes or World Series champs. On Tuesday, as the 84-year-old royal addressed the U.N. General Assembly for the first time since then, there was hardly a well-wisher to be found outside U.N. headquarters.
The low-key welcome was largely by design, reflective of the rest of the queen's somber New York agenda: a visit to Ground Zero, and to a m
Source: Science Daily
Jul 6, 2010
Among various important discoveries, the 2010 Kinneret Regional Project discovered an ancient synagogue, in use at around 400 AD. This year's archeological focus is the first systematic excavation on Horvat Kur, a village inhabited from the Early Roman through the Early Medieval periods located on a gentle hill two kilometers west of the Lake of Galilee.
Thirty volunteers -- mostly students of theology, religious studies, and archeology -- and staff from the Netherlands, Finland, Sw
Source: NYT
Jul 6, 2010
After breakfast, his parents left for their jobs, and Scott Nicholson, alone in the house in this comfortable suburb west of Boston, went to his laptop in the living room. He had placed it on a small table that his mother had used for a vase of flowers until her unemployed son found himself reluctantly stuck at home....
Complicating the generational divide, Scott’s grandfather, William S. Nicholson, a World War II veteran and a retired stock broker, has watched what he described as
Source: NYT
Jul 6, 2010
For the first time in 67 years, people are living in a certain rather famous town house on East 65th Street — up on the sixth floor, where the original occupants’ laundry flapped in the breeze long ago.
The original occupants were Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, and his mother, Sara. The mother commissioned the house in 1906 as a wedding present for her son and daughter-in-law. And on the theory of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer, Sara moved right in.
Source: NYT
Jul 6, 2010
The Eternal City is anything but.
Collapses this spring at a couple of ancient sites here caused weary archaeologists to warn, yet again, about other imminent calamities threatening Rome’s precarious architectural birthright.
Meanwhile, the smart set went gaga when an ostentatious national museum for contemporary art, Maxxi, opened recently, along with an expansion to the city-run new-art museum, Macro. That was just after Rome’s mayor, Gianni Alemanno, convened a confe
Source: Hannover Daily Record
Jul 6, 2010
A 66-year-old Livingston man was burned when a man asked him for a light and, instead of lighting a cigarette as he thought, he lit a paper cartridge filled with gun powder.
Police said Joseph Princiotta, 42, of Jersey City, obtained the cartridge from his friend, a Civil War re-enactor, who had the tube of gun powder with some of his re-enactment gear....
Source: CNN
Jul 6, 2010
California's parole board Tuesday refused to release onetime Manson family acolyte Leslie Van Houten, finding the 60-year-old remains dangerous more than four decades after the group's Southern California murder spree.
The board found that Van Houten "still poses a risk to society," spokesman Luis Patino said. The decision marks the 19th time that she has been denied parole, and she won't be eligible again until 2013, Patino said.
Known as "Lulu" whi
Source: CNN
Jul 6, 2010
Bobby Fischer was a master chess player, a man who once seemed the epitome of control. But Fischer's personal life was often chaotic and marked by mystery.
Los Angeles Times reporter Peter Nicholas and his wife, Clea Benson, also a reporter, spent years researching Fischer's life, digging through public records and conducting dozens of interviews with people who knew the Fischer family, discovering, among other things, that "Bobby was lied to most of his life about who his real
Source: Discovery News
Jul 6, 2010
A sandstone sculpture of a kneeling man sharpening a knife could be a long forgotten work by Michelangelo, according to an Italian scholar who has rediscovered the statue in a private collection.
Measuring 111 centimeters (3.65 feet), the statue is now on display for the first time after more than 120 years at the exhibition, “And There Was Light. The Masters of the Renaissance,” in Göteborg, Sweden.
The powerful sculpture is a copy of a marble statue known as the “Arro
Source: Discovery News
Jul 6, 2010
Arm bone remains show that Neanderthals were unusually pumped up on male hormones, possibly due to an all-meat diet.
Remains of an early Neanderthal with a super strong arm suggest that Neanderthal fellows were heavily pumped up on male hormones, possessing a hormonal status unlike anything that exists in humans today, according to a recent paper.
Neanderthal males probably evolved their ultra macho ways due to lifestyle, genes, climate and diet factors, suggests the st
Source: BBC
Jul 6, 2010
A painting of Flint Castle by Joseph Mallord William Turner has sold at auction for £541,250.
The painting, which had a top guide price of £500,000, was sold at Sotheby's in London.
The watercolour sketch over pencil is considered one of Turner's greatest Welsh landscapes, and captures the castle on the Dee Estuary in the 1830s.
It was sold by a private collector who did not want to be identified.
Turner completed a second watercolour of the ca
Source: BBC
Jul 6, 2010
Tesco has been given approval to exhume 19th Century human remains as it starts construction in Linwood, Renfrewshire.
A judge granted an order allowing the firm to open a burial vault at the former parish church and remove the corpses for cremation and reinterment.
Linwood has been described as a Tesco town after plans were approved to build a supermarket and other facilities which will supported by the company.
When the site was discovered Tesco put a cam
Source: BBC
Jul 6, 2010
A personalised account of life on board one of Lord Horatio Nelson's ships during the Napoleonic Wars has been made available online.
The logbook by Andrew Service charts his experiences on the 38-gun frigate Medusa in the early 1800s.
The Royal Navy Sailor, who was born in Port Glasgow in 1871, saw action in the Mediterranean, the East and West Indies and the North and South Americas.
His family donated the logbook to the University of Glasgow in the 198
