I love conspiracy theories.
The stories often have a smidgen of truth in them, but are amplified until they become larger.
So we are now reading lots of news stories about the genitalia stealing witches in Africa and that mobs are going around killing the witches in Africa.
Actually, the problem, called Koro, is a world wide phenomenum.
Usually […]

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As a Catholic Church, we need to be quite sensitive about the disposition of sacred articles that are no longer being used in our parishes. A trend developing is finding Catholic sacred articles on places such as E-Bay or other online salvage sites. The real problem with these sites is that there is no attempt […]

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Eat your heart out, Indiana Jones – and all those others who have been searching for the Ark of the Covenant for the last 2,700 years.  It’s been found in a small museum in Harare, Zimbabwe.  “I felt a shiver down my spine… a strange sanctity seemed to shine from it…”
 
The hero who claims to […]

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A quote from an ABC interview:
It’s one of the biggest censorships of history. So, I thought somebody should say this, and then others might disagree, say, “Ahhh, this could not be! This is blasphemy!” But it’s OK — this is the 21st century. It’s time for information. It’s time for communication. They can go check […]

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Ah yes, that glorious left over Plesiosaur that somehow escaped extinction and although cold blooded and alone, managed to live in the cold Scottish Loch is probably dead.
Yes, the Loch Ness monster is no more, a victim of global warming.
At least that’s what Nessie Hunter Robert Rines told the UKDaily Record:
Despite having hundreds of sonar […]

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I once worked in Winslow Arizona, where the main tourist attraction is a nearby meteor crater that they tout as the “best preserved meteor crater in the world”.
the photo is from their website, and if you ever get out there, consider a trip to the site.
It’s not as much fun as the Roswell museum, […]

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The oh so politically correct anthropologists at the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting.are going to debate if female mutilation under the guise of multiculturalism is okay.
Writes John Tierney of the NYTimes:
Should African women be allowed to engage in the practice sometimes called female circumcision? Are critics of this practice, who call it female genital […]

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The big news is that archeologists have reassembled King Tut’s mummy and are putting it on display, in a way that will protect the mummy from deterioration from the humidity and germs of visitors.
Tut’s head was removed at the time of discovery by over eager archeologists, so it’s nice to see him together again.
But with […]

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Another day, another giant Buddha destroyed.
Yup. It’s that bunch of cheerful Saudi funded Iconoclasts, better known as the Taliban, trying to purify the region of pagan idols.
Luckily there was little or no damage to these archeological treasures.

These treasures were made 2200 years ago during the spread of Buddhism in the area. Later Muslim conquerers allowed […]

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The most beautiful woman in the world.
Queen of Egypt, powerful consort of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, who tried unsuccessfully to instroduce monotheism to Egypt,  and one of the most powerful women in her times, Nefertiti. Reigning with her husband, she gave birth to six daughters, and her history disappeared 14 years into his reign, presumably from […]

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Many of those recovered from the Titanic were laid to rest without names.
One of the more poignant stories is that of an unknown baby who was found and laid to rest in Halifax Canada.
The child was one of some 150 Titanic victims buried in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
For decades, the boy was known simply […]

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The historic Ford’s Theater in Washington D.C., which is in the process of being renovated, is now going to be delayed several months because the bidding process for the job was unsuccessful. The National Park Service closed the theater in early June for an 18-month renovation job. The theater has since been reopened because bids […]

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Attention - Due To Allegations of Plagiarism, This Article Is Highly Suspect 
In the United Kingdom, which has many historical structures, the buildings which are listed or which lie within a conservation area are protected by law. Any repairs, alterations and modifications that are required to be done are meant to be done by firms and […]

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Most of the official Seven Wonders of the World have disappeared. Most people probably couldn’t even name them. Because of this, Bernard Weber, a Swiss-Canadian filmmaker and aviator decided that a new seven wonders list should be established for existing pieces of architecture. He created the site new7wonders.com to allow people to begin to vote […]

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Hartwood Mansion is a popular tourist attraction in Pittsburgh. Built in 1929 as a Tudor, Elizabethan style, the 31-room mansion sits on a 629-acre park. It was originally owned by John and Mary Lawrence. Mary was the daughter of Senator William Flinn who owned the city’s largest construction firm. In 1969, she sold the mansion […]

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This week, Titanic memorabilia was sold at Christie’s auction in Europe. Probably the most talked about item sold at the auction was a handwritten account of a 16-year-old girl who survived the sinking. Laura Marie Cribb, a third-class passenger from Newark, New Jersey scribbled her account on eight handwritten pages of the ocean liner’s last […]

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Forget the Egyptian cats.
Tabby probably domesticated us 12000 years ago in the Middle East, about the same time as agriculture was invented. The theory is that agriculture allowed fixed settlements and grain storage, and the cats were attracted by rats eating the grain, and gradually became used to humans, who fed and tamed them.
DNA studies […]

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In the dark days of World War II, the United States started flying B17 bombers across the Atlantic to England.
Operation Bolero was the name given to the operation that ferried the airplanes and crew on this difficult route, where original estimates was that ten percent of the flights would never arrive. But arrive they did:
By […]

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Richard Dawkins, scientist, atheist, and author of “The God Delusion”:
Refusing to believe that science and religion could ever be happy bedfellows, the self-confessed atheist said that professional scientists who did promote that theory needed to prove the existence of god because it was a scientific question.
Emphasis mine, to point out that there have been many […]

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Most people like a good ghost story, and one of the most popular is the story of King Tut’s curse.
As a scientist, I suspect the “Mummy’s curse” story originated with those trying to keep tomb robbers from stealing grandmom’s jewelry, and was reinforced by a nasty fungal infection that can kill those who open crypts…
So […]

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As a doc who has worked in cross cultural medicine most of my life, I love to read history. One of the sites I usually read is History News Network, a blog of George Mason University.
Often the essays are merely regurgitation of Chomsky, but sometimes you get insight into todays news thru the eyes of […]

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 Attention - Due To Allegations of Plagiarism, This Article Is Highly Suspect 

The famed Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan are now set to rise from rubble after they were blown up by the Talibanis in 2003. Now, even as the Taliban seeks to re-establish its presence in Afghanistan, Afghan authorities are trying to figure out a […]

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The LATimes reports that T.Rex might be related to FoghornLeghorn:
It began two years ago when paleontologist Mary H. Schweitzer and colleagues at North Carolina State University announced they had found bits of soft tissue inside a fossilized T. rex bone excavated from the Hell Creek Formation of Montana. At the time, no detailed tests had […]

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News Item:
Dinosaur extinction did not trigger evolution in mammals
When T-Rex ruled the planet, the evolution of mammals was stunted because dinosaurs were bigger, a whole lot bigger, and mammals were on the menu, so the mammals had to stay small, so they could hide, right?  If mammals, however, had been allowed to evolve to a […]

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The documentary on the so called “Jesus tomb” made several technical errors in their interpretation of the inscription of the bonebox they insist was Mary Magdalen’s bonebox, says one scholar.
The documentary claims that scholars read the inscription on one box as “Mariamene e Mara,” meaning “Mary the teacher” or “Mary the master.”
However, Stephen Pfann, a […]

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A sculptor at Palermo University has taken a 12 000 year old stone age woman’s skull and reconstructed it using techniques that are frequently used to identify crime victims.
To those of you in love with garlic and the Mediterranean diet, the University observed she died at age thirty, which was older than the average age […]

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Today’s edition of the daily round up is starting in my home state of Washington State where a group that is in favor of same sex marriages has taken a drastic step towards getting their cause recognized. In an effort to open “discussion about the many misguided assumptions” of the same sex ban that was […]

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What is Tarot?
Tarot (also known as Tarock, Tarokk, Taroky, Taroc, Tarok, Tarocchi and similar names) is a family of trick taking card games played with an enlarged deck of 78 cards which include an extra court card for each of the four regular suits, a permanent trump suit of 21 cards, and a kind of […]

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OffStumped For All Things Right of Center, Bringing a Right of Centre Reality Check to Indian Politics, News Media Reporting and Opinion now in Hindi अब आप के लिये हिंदी मे.
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The Prime Minister started his New Year with a healthy break off politics for a much needed consensus building with the opposition BJP inviting Vajpayee […]

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Coming to San Diego, June 29–December 31, 2007!
While the scrolls have been exhibited in the U.S. before, Dead Sea Scrolls will be the most comprehensive exhibition of the scrolls ever assembled, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Dead Sea Scrolls was created by the San Diego Natural History Museum for the Museum specifically, and will not travel to […]

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