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: RealClearScience
7-17-13
"They are the filthiest of all Allah’s creatures: they do not purify themselves after excreting or urinating or wash themselves when in a state of ritual impurity after coitus and do not even wash their hands after food."The Arab writer Ahmad ibn Fadlan noted the above after meeting Viking travellers around a thousand years ago.The Icelandic historian Thorir Jonsson Hraundal has studied comments about what we call Vikings in original texts by Arab historians and geographers. The texts described Arab encounters with Scandinavians in areas around the Caspian Sea and the Volga River. Their depictions differ radically from images of fearsome Viking conquerors handed down from the British Isles and France in the same era....
Source: National Post (Canada)
7-19-13
He was buried in an unmarked grave, but finally Richard III is to get a tomb fit for a king.British officials say they will spend US$1.5 million interring the 15th-century ruler, whose skeleton was found earlier this year beneath a parking lot in the central England city of Leicester.Officials at Leicester Cathedral said Thursday that Richard will be buried “with honor beneath a raised tomb within a specially created area in the cathedral.” The plans also include a new floor and a stained glass window....
Source: Salon
7-18-13
BANDUNG, Indonesia (AP) — Authorities in central Indonesia will ask a restaurant owner to explain his reasons for opening a Nazi-themed cafe that has sparked controversy among locals and tourists, an official said Thursday.Soldatenkaffee includes a red wall of Nazi-related memorabilia, including a large flag with the swastika and a giant picture of Adolf Hitler. Its wait staff dresses in SS, or Schutzstaffel, military uniforms, and can be seen posing in front of the cafe on its Facebook page.The cafe, located in the West Java provincial capital of Bandung, one of Indonesia’s tourist destination cities, has been open since April 2011. But a recent article in a local English-language newspaper has prompted angry responses from some foreigners and Indonesians on social networking sites....
Source: Boston Globe
7-18-13
SULLIVANS ISLAND, S.C. (AP) — Dozens of Civil War re-enactors gathered Thursday to commemorate the 150th anniversary of a famed attack by the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry — a battle in South Carolina that showed the world black soldiers could fight and was chronicled in the movie ‘‘Glory.’’Re-enactors portraying members of the black Union regiment as well as Confederate counterparts defending Battery Wagner in Charleston Harbor planned to travel Thursday afternoon by boat to Morris Island, site of the battle, to lay a wreath and fire a salute.Speeches and Civil War period music also were planned on nearby Sullivans Island — an inhabited barrier island near the harbor entrance — about the time of the evening attack 150 years ago. Luminaries were to be lit by nightfall in memory of the dead....
Source: Oxford University
7-16-13
A new study says Europe's first farmers used far more sophisticated practices than was previously thought. A research team led by the University of Oxford has found that Neolithic farmers manured and watered their crops as early as 6,000 BC.It had always been assumed that manure wasn't used as a fertiliser until Iron Age and Roman times. However, this new research shows that enriched levels of nitrogen-15, a stable isotope abundant in manure, have been found in the charred cereal grains and pulse seeds taken from 13 Neolithic sites around Europe. The findings are published in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study suggests that Neolithic farmers used the dung from their herds of cattle, sheep, goats and pigs as a slow release fertiliser for crops....
Source: Walk of Truth
7-15-13
According to an announcement from Walk of Truth, “some of the world’s finest religious art, recovered through a unique police sting operation in 1997, were finally restored to the people of Cyprus by the German authorities.“The objects are part of a cache of thousands of mosaics, icons and other cultural objects which were found in the possession of Aydin Dikmen, a Turkish-born art dealer, during and after a police raid on his Munich apartment on October 10, 1997. “Most of these objects had been looted from churches in the Turkish-occupied north of Cyprus in the wake of the island’s invasion in 1974. Their discovery followed a sting operation carried out by 70 officers of the Bavarian police and Walk of Truth’s founder, Mrs Tasoula Hadjitofi, who was acting for the Church of Cyprus. The operation also involved Michel van Rijn, a Dutch art dealer who acted as an intermediary....
Source: Archaeology News Network
7-16-13
Mysterious, pyramid-like structures spotted in the Egyptian desert by an amateur satellite archaeologist might be long-lost pyramids after all, according to a new investigation into the enigmatic mounds.Angela Micol, who last year found the structures using Google Earth 5,000 miles away in North Carolina, says puzzling features have been uncovered during a preliminary ground proofing expedition, revealing cavities and shafts. "Moreover, it has emerged these formations are labeled as pyramids on several old and rare maps," Micol told Discovery News....
Source: AP
7-15-13
TUCSON — The first plane to be designated as Air Force One now sits in a southern Arizona field that’s part of Marana Regional Airport.The aircraft that once spirited President Dwight D. Eisenhower on cross-country voyages is nearly forgotten on a 10-acre parcel, decaying under the relentless glare of the sun.“I think it’s one of these big secrets that, really, few people know that it’s out there,” airport manager Steve Miller told The Arizona Daily Star. “It’s sad that it’s just sitting out there, considering its history over the past 70 years.”...
Source: Detroit News
7-18-13
Ypsilanti— The great warplane relics of America’s past are treasures to Ray Hunter, who would like to see the Yankee Air Force Museum find a new home in a historic airport hangar.The 76-year-old Air Force veteran, who flew rescue helicopter missions in Vietnam, is one of the many former service members who hope the museum can raise nearly $5 million to save and renovate part of the former Willow Run bomber plant building into its new home on the grounds of the Willow Run Airport.“The museum will go on,” he said. “We’re in a facility now. We’d rather be all under one roof because we want the public to be able to look at these airplanes that we are so proud of.”...
Source: Toronto Star
7-16-13
Aboriginal children were deliberately starved in the 1940s and ’50s by government researchers in the name of science.Milk rations were halved for years at residential schools across the country.Essential vitamins were kept from people who needed them.Dental services were withheld because gum health was a measuring tool for scientists and dental care would distort research.For over a decade, aboriginal children and adults were unknowingly subjected to nutritional experiments by Canadian government bureaucrats....
Source: Guardian (UK)
7-17-13
A Romanian museum is analysing ashes found in a stove to see if they are the remains of seven paintings by Picasso, Matisse, Monet and others that were stolen last year from the Netherlands, an official has said.The prosecutor's spokeswoman, Gabriela Chiru, told Associated Press that Romania's National History Museum was examining the ashes found in the stove of Olga Dogaru. She is the mother of Radu Dogaru, one of three Romanian suspects charged with stealing the paintings from Rotterdam's Kunsthal gallery in a daytime heist.It was the biggest art theft in more than a decade in the Netherlands. The stolen works have an estimated value of tens of millions of dollars if they were sold at auction....
Source: ITV
7-16-13
A hidden hoard of eighteenth century recipes has come to light for the first time in nearly 200 years in a central London archives centre.Staff at Westminster City Councils Archives Centre came across the recipes earlier this year in a digital project where some sources were posted online and began sharing its culinary delights in the Cookbook of Unknown Ladies blog.With more than 350 recipes dating from 1690 to 1830, followers of the online blog will be able to find out how to make dishes such as Veal kidney Florentine, a pastry tart with kidney, apples, lettuce, orange peel, spices and currants, or Mammas Mince Pyes, made with a mince mixture of candied fruits and cows tongue....
Source: ProPublica
7-16-13
The U.S. Army has conceded a significant loss of records documenting battlefield action and other operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and has launched a global search to recover and consolidate field records from the wars.In an order to all commands and a separate letter to leaders of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, Secretary of the Army John McHugh said the service also is taking immediate steps to clarify responsibility for wartime recordkeeping....
Source: NYT
7-15-13
BISHOPVILLE, S.C. — Inside a fenced acre on the swampy Lynches River flood plain in central South Carolina, seven of Don Anderson’s primitive dogs spring into high alert at approaching strangers. Medium-sized, they fan out amid his junkyard of improvised habitat: a few large barrels to dig under, an abandoned camper shell from a pickup, segments of black plastic water pipe and backhoed dirt mounds overgrown with waist-high ragweed....Some Carolina dogs still live in the wild, and local people have long thought they were one of the few breeds that predated the European arrival in the Americas: “Our native dog,” as Michael Ruano, another enthusiast who often works with Mr. Anderson, put it. “America’s natural dog.”
Source: Detroit News
7-16-13
Detroit— The Smithsonian Institution has been on a two-year hunt for a fabled oil painting of legendary Detroit business tycoon Berry Gordy Jr., founder of Motown Records. The portrait: Gordy dressed as Napoleon.The painting, created by a Detroit artist, is just as it sounds. Gordy, the brilliant, autocratic founder of one of the most iconic music labels ever, is depicted in early-19th-century military garb of the French emperor who tried to conquer the world.“Berry said, ‘Damn, I like that,’” the artist, DeVon Cunningham, recalled Gordy commenting when he first saw the portrait that had been commissioned by Gordy’s sister.That was in 1969 at Gordy’s former Boston-Edison home in Detroit. And that was the last time Cunningham saw the portrait....
Source: Der Spiegel
7-16-13
Three elaborately printed pamphlets containing writings by church reformer Martin Luther have been stolen from a small museum in Eisenach. Historians say the theft of the leaflets, worth about 60,000 euros, is a blow to Europe's cultural memory.Church authorities and historians in Germany have reacted with shock to the news that three original printed pamphlets containing writings by Martin Luther were stolen from a museum in Eisenach, Germany, last Friday.A member of staff at the Lutherhaus museum in Eisenach noticed that the 16th-century papers were missing from a glass case at 2 p.m. last Friday afternoon.Even though the pamphlets are printed, they are unique because they contain hand-written notes by contemporaries of Luther....
Source: Guardian (UK)
7-15-13
Threats to the fearsome reputation of Tyrannosaurs rex appeared to have been seen off on Monday by fresh evidence unearthed in the US.The dinosaur's feeding habits have long been debated by academics, with some claiming that T rex was less a ferocious hunter and more a lumbering slowcoach that scavenged the carcasses of beasts that had died at the claws of others.The latest evidence comes from palaeontologists who found remnants of a prehistoric skirmish in a slab of rock at the Hell Creek Formation in South Dakota. The clash, which occurred around 66m years ago, involved a T rex and a large, plant-eating hadrosaur, and ended with the tooth of the former lodged firmly in the spine of the latter.Scans of the tooth and two surrounding tail vertebrae showed clear signs of bone healing around the wound, taken as proof that the hadrosaur was alive at the time of the attack and survived for several months or even years afterwards....
Source: WSJ
7-13-13
BUFFALO, N.Y. — Archaeology buffs are invited to watch diggers uncovering history this summer on the Buffalo waterfront.A group of archaeologists and University at Buffalo graduate students is working near a construction site along Main Street at Canalside. They hope to uncover artifacts dating back to Buffalo's 18th century heyday as the terminus of the Erie Canal....
Source: WSJ
7-12-13
If the Mets still called Shea Stadium home, Major League Baseball probably wouldn't let them host next week's All-Star Game, one of the sport's premier events.Taken at its best, Shea stood as a nostalgic remnant from a kooky bygone era by the time the Mets vacated the old place following the 2008 season. Most people probably didn't read that much into it: They just referred to it as a dump.But dismissing Shea Stadium as nothing more than an ugly blue semicircle surrounded by a sea of auto-part shops—and it certainly fit that description at the end—ignores the building's influential role in ballpark history.When the All-Star Game last came to Flushing in 1964, the three-month-old Shea represented a bold vision of the future. It just so happens that "the future" became "the past" far quicker than anybody imagined....
Source: BBC News
7-14-13
Archaeologists believe they have discovered the world's oldest lunar "calendar" in an Aberdeenshire field.Excavations of a field at Crathes Castle found a series of 12 pits which appear to mimic the phases of the moon and track lunar months.A team led by the University of Birmingham suggests the ancient monument was created by hunter-gatherers about 10,000 years ago.The pit alignment, at Warren Field, was first excavated in 2004.The experts who analysed the pits said they may have contained a wooden post....
