SUBTERRANEAN JUNGLE: Another Brutal Subway Attack By Gang Of Teens
By Tyesha Tazwell’s count, there were a dozen of them — six girls, six boys — hanging around together. One of the girls tried to get Tazwell’s attention by uttering a polite-sounding “Excuse me.” Then they pounced. Tazwell, 24, said it took only a few seconds for the teens to knock her to the ground. They pounded her face with a barrage of kicks and punches, stole her purse and chanted “Watch your mouth! Watch your mouth!” when she finally got to her feet and tried to get help. Police said she was attacked near an underground concourse between SEPTA’s underground lines and the Gallery mall at 8th and Market streets Wednesday night – exactly one week after Starbucks manager Sean Patrick Conroy died after being beaten by six teens on a SEPTA concourse just five blocks away. “They were children,” Tazwell said last night. “I don’t know them. I’ve never seen them, but they committed this act of violence. It doesn’t make any sense.” [via DAILY NEWS]
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IT’S LATER THAN YOU THINK: Ancient Piece Of Shit Upends American Timeline
Fossilized excrement found in an Oregon cave has given scientists the hardest evidence to date that humans roamed the New World at least 1,000 years earlier than previously believed. The prehistoric poop, deposited in a cave some 14,300 years ago, contains DNA from the forebears of modern-day Native Americans, according to the research.The discovery reported today by the journal Science added fresh weight to emerging theories that Stone Age people from Asia somehow bypassed ice sheets sealing off North America before 11,000 BC. Nearly all scholars agree that humans were present by then, but until recently few archaeologists accepted that an earlier arrival was even possible because of the formidable ice barriers.The new dating comes from 14 pieces of fossilized excrement, called coprolites, found within the Paisley Caves complex by University of Oregon archaeologist Dennis L. Jenkins, and painstakingly analyzed by genetic anthropologists in Denmark. “This is the earliest direct evidence of a human presence in the Americas,” said Eske Willerslev, director of the University of Copenhagen’s Center for Ancient Genetics, which extracted human mitochondrial DNA from six of the feces. [via BOSTON GLOBE]
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VOX UNPOPULI: NYT Poll Finds 81% Think Country Is On The Wrong Track
Americans are more dissatisfied with the country’s direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s, according to the latest poll. In the poll, 81 percent of respondents said they believed “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” up from 69 percent a year ago and 35 percent in early 2002. Although the public mood has been darkening since the early days of the war in Iraq, it has taken a new turn for the worse in the last few months, as the economy has seemed to slip into recession. There is now nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems. A majority of nearly every demographic and political group — Democrats and Republicans, men and women, residents of cities and rural areas, college graduates and those who finished only high school — say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off. [via NEW YORK TIMES]