This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: Huffington Post
December 19, 2011
A controversial effort to honor the life of fairy tale author Hans Christian Andersen with a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) festival in his native Denmark has sparked a row between local politicians and advocates.As The Telegraph is reporting, the gay-themed, week-long Andersen celebration was the brainchild of Trine Bramsen, a member of the country's parliament, who believes the LGBT literary gala would attract more visitors to the town of Odense on the island of Funen, where the author was born in 1805. "There is so much palaver about Hans Christian Andersen's sexuality, and I think we should use it," she said, noting that she believed the event could also capitalize on the country's marriage equality law. "It should be a week where gays from all over the world can come to the island of Funen."...
Source: Al Arabiya
December 20, 2011
Turkish President Abdullah Gul made an appeal to France on Tuesday to drop an Armenian genocide bill as soon as possible, saying that the planned legislation was unacceptable. “It is not possible for us to accept this bill which denies us the freedom to reject unfair and groundless accusations targeting our country and our nation,” Gul said in a statement. His remarks came as the French parliament prepares to vote Thursday on a law making it illegal to deny the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Gul urged France to abort this initiative as soon as possible as it will block any objective research of the 1915 events....
Source: Beaver County Times
December 20, 2011
Sweden will commemorate the centenary of the birth of Raoul Wallenberg in 2012 with a series of postage stamps and a touring exhibition about the World War II hero credited with rescuing tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews.Organizers launched a photo exhibition about Wallenberg in Stockholm on Tuesday, and two new stamps that will go on sale in May. The exhibition will tour Hungary, Germany, Russia, Israel, the United States and Canada next year.As Sweden's envoy in the Hungarian capital of Budapest from July 1944, Wallenberg saved 20,000 Jews by giving them Swedish travel documents, or moving them to safe houses. He also dissuaded German officers from massacring the 70,000 inhabitants of the city's ghetto.However, he disappeared after being arrested by the Soviet army in Budapest in January 1945 and his fate has since remained one of the great mysteries of WWII.The Russians have claimed Wallenberg was executed on July 17, 1947, but have never produced a reliable death certificate or his remains. Unverified witness accounts and new evidence from Russian archives suggest he was still alive years later....
Source: NYT
December 19, 2011
Greek, Aramaic, Latin, Parthian, Middle Persian and Hebrew — all of these languages were used concurrently throughout the society, according to inscriptions and graffiti uncovered by archaeologists. A temple altar epitomizes the multiculturalism: The inscription is in Greek, and a man with a Latin name and a Greek-titled office in the Roman army is shown presenting an offering to Iarhibol, a god of the migrants from the old Syrian caravan city of Palmyra.New Yorkers would have felt at home in the grid pattern of streets, where merchants lived, scribes wrote and Jews worshiped in the same block, not far from a Christian house-church as well as shrines to Greek and Palmyrene deities. Scholars said the different religious groups seemed to maintain their distinct identities.An exhibition of prized and quotidian artifacts from Dura-Europos, “Edge of Empires: Pagans, Jews, and Christians at Roman Dura-Europos,” is on view through Jan. 8 at New York University’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. The objects — notably art from antiquity’s best-preserved synagogue, and evocative photographs of the buried city’s excavations — are on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery....
Source: New Zealand Herald
December 19, 2011
For centuries, scientists and historians have argued over why Stonehenge was built and, even more puzzlingly, how.They are now closer to cracking one aspect of the mystery after working out the exact spot where some of the rocks came from.The 5000-year-old circle of stones - thought at various times to have been a temple of healing, a calendar, or even a royal cemetery - have been traced to an outcrop 150 miles (241km) away in north Pembrokeshire.Dr Richard Bevins of the National Museum of Wales and Dr Robert Ixer at Leicester University narrowed down the source of the rocks - called rhyolites - to the 70m-long area called Craig Rhos-y-Felin after testing thousands of samples and finding a match.
Source: Reuters
December 18, 2011
North Korean leader Kim Jong-il died of a heart attack while on a train trip, state media reported on Monday, sparking immediate concern over who is in control of the reclusive state and its nuclear program.A tearful television announcer dressed in black said the 69-year old had died on Saturday of physical and mental over-work on his way to give "field guidance."Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il's youngest son, is seen as the leader-in-waiting after he was appointed to senior political and military posts in 2010.
Source: NYT
December 14, 2011
THE ultimate pleasure of taking an online dip into the entirety of the Vogue archives — every issue since 1892 has been digitally scanned, page by page, and made available through a pricey new subscription site — is the sensation that it gives of falling into a fashion time machine and being shot out into different eras at random.Click on the issue of Oct. 1, 1950, and you will find a cover by Horst P. Horst of Margot Smyly, the silver-haired model known as Mrs. Exeter, who appealed to older readers, and the promise inside of finding easy-to-wear clothes “in sizes 10 to 44.”Click on June 24, 1897, and you will see a drawing of a hooked fish, a reference to the sporting theme of the fashions in that issue....
Source: USAF
December 14, 2011
November marked the 21st anniversary of the observance of American Indian and Alaskan Native Heritage Month. President George H.W. Bush made the proclamation in 1990 and declared 1992 as the "Year of the American Indian" by way of congressional legislation. The U.S. Military has a long and storied tradition of extraordinary contributions from American Indians and Alaska Natives. From the Revolutionary War where Gen. George Washington enlisted the skills of American Indians to liberate the colonies, to the War of 1812 where Native Americans served on state and continental ships, Native Americans have added to the strong foundation we enjoy today. Their excellence continued in World Wars I and II where nearly 35,000 American Indians fought for their country. The most famous of these were the Navajo Code Talkers who used their native language to communicate along the front lines. This led to Maj. Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division signal officer, saying, "Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would have never taken Iwo Jima."...
Source: WaPo
December 15, 2011
BERLIN — A 90-year-old man convicted last year of killing three Dutch civilians while he was part of a Nazi SS hit squad during World War II has been taken to prison to start serving his life sentence.Robert Deller, a spokesman for prosecutors in Aachen, said Heinrich Boere was taken by ambulance Wednesday from the old-age home where he lived to a detention facility. He declined to specify the prison’s location....
Source: WaPo
December 14, 2011
WASHINGTON — With Dakota Meyer standing at attention in his dress uniform, sweat glistening on his forehead under the television lights, President Barack Obama extolled the former Marine corporal for the “extraordinary actions” that had earned him the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor.Obama told the audience in the White House East Room on Sept. 15 that Meyer had driven into the heart of a savage ambush in eastern Afghanistan against orders. He’d killed insurgents at near-point-blank range, twice leapt from his gun turret to rescue two dozen Afghan soldiers and saved the lives of 13 U.S. service members as he fought to recover the bodies of four comrades, the president said.But there’s a problem with this account: Crucial parts that the Marine Corps publicized and Obama described are untrue, unsubstantiated or exaggerated, according to dozens of military documents McClatchy Newspapers examined.
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
December 16, 2011
PARIS: It was one of the most shameful and shady chapters of French history: the collaboration of industrialists and business owners with the Nazis during the German occupation.A historical can of worms was reopened in a Paris court on Wednesday when the grandchildren of the inventor and car maker Louis Renault began a legal battle claiming his famous company was unfairly confiscated by the state as punishment for allegedly collaborating with the occupiers.Mr Renault, who founded the car maker in 1898 with his brothers, died in prison while awaiting trial for collaboration in 1944, two months after the liberation of France. In January 1945 Charles de Gaulle and the provisional government signed a decree confiscating the company and nationalising it, accusing Mr Renault of working for the Germans and providing their armies with vehicles and services to help the Nazi war effort....
Source: Jewish Telegraph Agency
December 15, 2011
(JTA) -- The European Union has donated more than $5 million to preserve the site of the Auschwitz Nazi death camp.Auschwitz authorities announced Wednesday that the $5.3 million awarded by the European Commission, the executive body of the EU, will be used to preserve the women's barracks at the Birkenau site of the camp, improve security and expand the database system....
Source: Guardian (UK)
December 15, 2011
In 1971 the US was pulling troops out of Vietnam, and its bases in Germany were full of draftees at a loose end. "You were painting shovels, picking up cigarette butts – it was a lot of busy-work," remembers former serviceman Lewis Hitt. "There was a longing by everyone, especially the draftees, to get home and go back to what you were doing before."This was the crucible in which were formed scores of raucous funk bands made up of servicemen, four of which have just been compiled by Now-Again Records. Adoring crowd noise was crudely dubbed on top of their records, which were then distributed in recruitment centres. These bands were used by the army to present service as varied, even hip. But the songs they cover – the bitter, suspicious likes of Backstabbers and Smiling Faces Sometimes – undermine any potential propagandising.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
December 15, 2011
It was a rare reflection by Mitt Romney on his life as a young Mormon, offered as proof to struggling Americans that despite being born into privilege and amassing a $250 million fortune, he too had known hard times.A day after being labelled “out of touch” for casually offering a $10,000 bet to a rival candidate, Mr Romney told supporters he had experienced austerity as a missionary in France, using a bucket for a lavatory and a hose for a shower. “You’re not living high on the hog at that kind of level,” he said.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
December 16, 2011
Meryl Streep is being trumpeted as a likely Oscar winner for her performance as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, but the film worries John Campbell, on whose biography it is based.“Like any film of that sort, it simplifies and it dramatises her as a great individual, fighting against all these things as if it was just her on her own,” says the author, who acted as a consultant and was even given a cameo role as the manager of an ice-cream company visited by Thatcher.“It does not credit her colleagues like Geoffrey Howe, or anybody else. The other politicians are made to look wet – she bashes them....
Source: NYT
December 15, 2011
SEOUL, South Korea — The unsmiling teenage girl in traditional Korean dress sits in a chair, her feet bare, her hands on her lap, her eyes fixed on the Japanese Embassy across a narrow street in central Seoul. Within a day, the life-size bronze statue had become the focal point of a simmering diplomatic dispute as President Lee Myung-bak prepared to visit Tokyo this weekend.The statue, named the Peace Monument, was financed with citizens’ donations and installed Wednesday, when five women in their 80s and 90s, who were among thousands forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during World War II, protested in front of the embassy, joined by their supporters. Such protests have been held weekly for almost 20 years.
Source: NYT
December 15, 2011
PARIS — In his dark comedy of 1893, “A Woman of No Importance,” Oscar Wilde has Mrs. Arbuthnot, a respectable woman with a secret past, remark knowingly: “A kiss may ruin a human life.”It can also, apparently, ruin the stone blocks of a tomb.Recently, descendants of Wilde, the Irish dramatist and wit who died here in 1900, decided to have his immense gravestone cleansed of a vast accumulation of lipstick markings from kisses left by admirers, who for years have been defacing, and some say eroding, the memorial in hilly Père Lachaise Cemetery here. But the decision meant not only cleaning the stone, a flying nude angel by the sculptor Jacob Epstein, who was inspired by the British Museum’s Assyrian figures, but also erecting a seven-foot plate glass wall to keep ardent admirers at a distance.
Source: CBS News
December 15, 2011
CBS News video: Nanny's secret photography talent on display - Vivian Maier worked as a full time nanny and housekeeper in Chicago. But whenever the opportunity arose, she took to the streets to indulge in her secret talent of taking remarkable photographs. Anthony Mason reports.
Source: Salon
December 15, 2011
George Whitman has died. He was 98.You may not know his name but if you speak English and have ever visited Paris you probably know his bookshop: Shakespeare & Co.Whitman set up the shop in 1951. He was one of a generation of Americans — mostly ex GIs on the GI bill — who went to Paris after World War II and tried to re-start the party that made the French capital the center of western culture in the ’20s and ’30s, the place where the Hemingway and Fitzgerald legends were born.The Paris Review was started. William Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, George Plimpton, humorist Art Buchwald and jazz musicians too numerous to mention moved back. There were so many Americans in the city that M-G-M made a Gene Kelly musical about ex-patriot life called “An American in Paris” the year Whitman opened his shop. It won the Best Picture Oscar.By the mid-1950′s though it was clear the party was over and New York was the place where cutting edge culture was being created. Paris was something of a perfectly preserved museum of an era comprehensively demolished by war. Most of the ex-pats headed home.
Source: 3 News (NZ)
December 7, 2011
Archaeologists have discovered mysterious stone carvings at an excavation site in Jerusalem. The carvings - which were engraved thousands of years ago - have baffled experts.Israeli archaeologists excavating in the oldest part of the city discovered a complex of rooms with three "V" shapes carved into the floor. Yet there were no other clues as to their purpose and nothing to identity the people who made them.Some experts believe the markings were made at least 2,800 years ago and may have helped hold up some kind of wooden structure. Others say an ancient people may have held ritual functions there.The purpose of the complex is another aspect of the mystery....
