The pygmy sperm whales had repeatedly beached, and both they and the humans were tired and set to give up, he said.

But then the dolphin appeared, communicated with the whales, and led them to safety.

Well, exonerated perhaps. According to this article, the Vatican is going to publish a book which will reveal the truth behind the heresy hearings of the Knights Templar in the 14th Century. A recently discovered record of those hearings completely absolves them, apparently. Or, more precisely, they were absolved at a later hearing by the Pope.

A town in Siberia, abandoned. Warren Ellis linked to these eerie photos. A little bit of digging reveals the bleak story behind them, and more digging shows a couple of photos from happier days.

"Kadykchan is closed," bellowed the local administration chief. Move away now, "or refuse everything and live here as Robinson Crusoe."

Undaunted, the final holdouts of Kadykchan said they were prepared to make a last stand against resettlement from their frigid corner of Russia's far north. Never mind the Mad Max-in-the-Arctic vista, the ruined landscape of burned-out houses and caved-in roofs where a prosperous Soviet coal-mining town once stood. They were being offered too little, too late to give up their crumbling apartments.

Meteorite crashes in Peru, people nearby get sick. Familiar, isn't it? It's odd, as only last night I had a dream about an alien invasion, although that one was spearheaded by Simon Pegg and Alun Armstrong, not space rocks.

Nabbed from metafilter, a story about vast underground cities in Turkey:

No one knows how many underground cities lie beneath Cappadocia. Eight have been discovered, and many smaller villages, but there are doubtless more. The biggest, Derinkuyu, wasn't discovered until 1965, when a resident cleaning the back wall of his cave house broke through a wall and discovered behind it a room that he'd never seen, which led to still another, and another. Eventually, spelunking archeologists found a maze of connecting chambers that descended at least 18 stories and 280 feet beneath the surface, ample enough to hold 30,000 people - and much remains to be excavated. One tunnel, wide enough for three people walking abreast, connects to another underground town six miles away. Other passages suggest that at one time all of Cappadocia, above and below the ground, was linked by a hidden network. Many still use the tunnels of this ancient subway as cellar storerooms.

More info on Wikipedia - apparently it was built by the Phrygians in the 8-7th centuries BC, and then expanded in the 5-10th centuries AD. Wikipedia witters about early Christians hiding there, but it looks like random blather.

An article on the I Ching, which says a lot of things about schema theory (how information is processed in the brain) and cultural context. Here's a paragraph that pinged something in my head:

If the Yi Jing were written today, it would be necessary to use situations, and schemata, that correspond to our world-view and our understanding of the interrelations of the world. Some hexagrams would talk about politics, and we can imagine one called Cohabitation. This hexagram describes a situation where the emperor is required to rule with a minister who does not think along the same lines as he does. [This refers to the political situation in France, where I live, at the time I was writing the article. As the reader can see, this reference is already obscure, especially to those outside of France.] The Landing would be a hexagram describing how a coalition of foreign armies comes to help liberate a country that is occupied. Or The Old Bridge would describe the symbol of a beautiful centuries-old bridge that is destroyed in a country splitting apart during a bloody civil war, where no other countries come to their aid.

Well, there's an interesting project. Of course I had a play at a slightly facetious version of this years ago, with the Predicto...