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By DWIGHT LEWIS
17 Feb 06 Where was Harry Belafonte? Where was the entertainer, civil rights activist and humanitarian last week when funeral services were held for Coretta Scott King?
Why wasn't he present? Mrs. King's husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Belafonte were very close before King was assassinated April 4, 1968 as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. 
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18 February 2006
NewScientist.com news service If someone could tell you when you were going to die, would you want to know? It's no longer such a hypothetical question now that a "death index" can predict with 80 per cent accuracy whether or not someone over 50 is likely to die within four years.
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16 February 2006
New Scientist Print Edition IT SEEMS that Tutankhamen, the teenage king of ancient Egypt, sloped off to the afterlife with a good supply of fine white wine. It's a surprising discovery, considering there is no record of white wine in Egypt until the 3rd century AD, 1600 years after the young pharaoh died.
Rosa Lamuela-Raventós and her colleagues from the University of Barcelona, Spain, used liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry to analyse the residue from six of the jars in Tutankhamen's tomb. All contained tartaric acid, a chemical characteristic of grapes, but only one contained syringic acid, found in the skin of red grapes. It's this skin that gives red wine its colour. The absence of the chemical in the other five jars suggests the wine in them was white. Because it is unlikely Egyptian wine makers would have removed red grape skins to create white wines as modern wine makers do, white grapes probably did exist in Tutankhamen's time. In ancient Egypt, red wine was placed in tombs to accompany people into the afterlife. Now it appears that white wine was on the menu too. "It must have been considered a very good drink," says Lamuela-Raventós, whose findings are reported in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.
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SOTT
February 18, 2006 
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