Reports

Some 400 years ago in North Peru, a Spaniard had jotted down numbers on the back of a letter. The small piece of paper has now been excavated by archaeologists and it has revealed traces of a lost language. A combined research team of US–Peruvian archaeologists at Santa Mar´ıa Magdalena de Cao in the Chicama Valley of North Peru found this document that lists a few but important words that serve as keys to unlocking the intricacies of a native language that was spoken in prehistory and into the...

Some people have all the luck. Six such individuals from the world over now have the opportunity to work as panda caretakers for one month, after an intense three-hour live showdown on China’s largest television network, CCTV. Starting October 1, the six finalists will spend three weeks at the Chengdu Panda Base where they will learn about all aspects of giant panda care, breeding and conservation. One important stop will be a visit to a WWF conservation project at the Longxi-Hongkou Nature...

Energy giant Shell's new Brazilian joint-venture partner is producing biofuels from land taken from an impoverished Indian tribe. Last month, Shell signed a $12 billion deal to produce biofuels from sugar cane with Brazilian biofuels giant Cosan. But some of Cosan’s sugar cane is grown on land officially recognised as belonging to Guarani Indians. A Brazilian prosecutor with constitutional powers to defend indigenous rights in court, has written to Shell warning that its involvement in the joint...

African-American seniors are twice as likely to be mistreated than elders of other races. They are five times more susceptible to being swindled, the first population-based survey on the psychological abuse of senior citizens in the US has found. Reporting the survey results in The Gerontologist journal, University of Pittsburgh researchers have called for health care and social service workers to be especially vigilant for the possible mistreatment of African American seniors. The survey is...

Directly challenging extremist ideology through exposing the fallacies, contradictions and harmful effects of jihadist concepts and actions is a better way of tackling them than closing down extremist websites, a think-tank has concurred. Quilliam, a London-based think-tank whose founders are former ideologues of UK-based extremist Islamist organisations, has based its conclusions on an 18-month study of Arabic-language websites that eventually focused on 20 discussion forums. Unlike earlier...

Not only do journalists worldwide accept bribes but often reporters and editors are the instigators, extorting either for publishing favourable stories or for not publishing damaging ones, a new report states. A report Cash for Coverage: Bribery of Journalists Around the World by the Washington DC-based Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA) calls it "a single problem with many faces." In South Africa, a journalist admitted in an affidavit that he and several others had set up a media...

The British Library in London has posted more than a quarter of its Greek manuscripts, equating to more than 280 volumes, online, the latest step toward digitising important ancient documents. The manuscripts, available for free on its website at www.bl.uk/manuscripts, are part of one of the most important collections outside Greece for the study of more than 2,000 years of Hellenic culture. The website provides researchers with access to high quality digital images of a major part of the...

An international group of researchers, journalists and diplomats will study the impact of America’s first African American President. They will analyse the challenges facing the President and the significance of his policies. The AHRC Obama Research Network will also organise symposia and seminars and stage an international conference just after the next presidential election in 2012, and publish the results on a dedicated website. The events will take place at the universities of Edge Hill...

Palestinian and Israeli children not only suffer the direct physical consequences of violence, they are also being psychologically scarred by the high levels of violence they witness. Researchers from the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR) have found that nearly 50 percent of Palestinian children between the ages of 11 and 14 have seen other Palestinians upset or crying because someone they knew or loved had been killed by Israelis. Nearly the same proportion reported...

If your general knowledge is better than average, you will wonder how someone could do this. But yes, the cash-rich Union Ministry of Tourism has released a stamp with an African elephant on it. This laudable initiative was taken on the occasion of World Tourism Day on Monday, September 27. This year the theme is 'tourism and biodiversity'. So the ministry, led by the exuberant Selja, tried to do its bit — by putting an African elephant on a stamp. The tourism ministry released as many as 18...