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: BBC News
December 12, 2011
Actor Christian Bale has defended his role in a Chinese-language film portraying the 1937 massacre of Chinese by Japan's imperial army in Nanjing.Critics say the film is nationalistic and anti-Japanese, but Bale says the film is not Chinese propaganda."It's far more a movie about human beings and the nature of human beings' responses to crisis," he said.The film, The Flowers of War, will be released across China on Friday and in the US in late December....
Source: NYT
December 12, 2011
Few cities of recent vintage have a history as complicated and contested as New Delhi, which turned 100 on Monday. Now the seat of the world’s largest democracy, New Delhi began in 1911 as a grand imperial showpiece meant to stand for eternal British rule over the Indian subcontinent. But during its two decades of construction New Delhi became the stage upon which Indians gained increasing political advantage over a crumbling Raj.New Delhi literally began as an imperial edict. In December 1911, King George V traveled to Delhi in order to be crowned emperor of India at an elaborate durbar, or gathering: he was the first reigning British monarch to step foot on Indian soil. After several days of ceremonies at a temporary city consisting of some 40,000 tents and featuring its own railway system, King George V offered two boons to his subjects: First, he revoked the partition of Bengal, an act that had unleashed violent anti-British agitation. Second, he announced the creation of a new city in the vicinity of Delhi to replace Calcutta as the imperial capital. The city, George hoped, would be a fusion of Indian and European architecture, according to a letter from his viceroy to one of his colleagues.
Source: Yahoo News
December 7, 2011
CHICAGO (Reuters) - Judging by their "before" and "after" photographs, U.S. presidents appear to age before our eyes, adding wrinkles and gray hair with each year in office.But contrary to conventional wisdom, a few years in the White House do not appear to cut short the lives of U.S. presidents, and most live longer than their peers, according to a new study released on Tuesday."Just because they experience what would appear to be accelerated aging outwardly, doesn't mean they will die any sooner," said S. Jay Olshansky, a demographer at the University of Illinois at Chicago, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association.Olshansky became interested in the subject earlier this summer when President Barack Obama celebrated his 50th birthday in Chicago, their shared hometown....
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
December 7, 2011
Today is the 70th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In honor of the day, here’s a roundup of some blog posts and other media that highlight archival resources devoted to December 7, 1941.—”Pearl Harbor: In Their Own Words”: Among the many World War II records the National Archives holds is a collection of the deck logs kept by U.S. Navy ships stationed in Pearl Harbor. In this short video, Archives technicians talk about and read from some of the logs. The entries begin very early in the morning, with ships encountering nothing more alarming than the delivery of “large amounts of ice cream,” one technician says. By 07:58, the log of the U.S.S. Dale, a Navy destroyer, records “waves of torpedo planes, level bombers, and dive bombers marked with Japanese insignia attacked Pearl Harbor. Sounded general alarm. … 0810: Opened fire on planes with machine guns, followed by main battery.”—At the Text Message, a National Archives blog that follows “the work and discoveries of processing and reference archivists on the job,” Robert Finch, a student technician, writes about finding a family connection to Pearl Harbor as he worked on the Navy Deck Logs collection....
Source: AP
December 7, 2011
MOSCOW (AP) — Russian authorities should annul the results of the parliamentary vote and hold a new one, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev urged Wednesday as popular indignation grew over widespread allegations of election fraud.The call for an entirely new vote by the last president of the Soviet Union was a remarkable development for an election that had not generated much interest during the campaign. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had wanted to see his United Russia party do well to pave the way for his return to the presidency, but few Russians seemed to care about the vote, with many saying they assumed the results would be manipulated anyway.United Russia won less than 50 percent of Sunday's vote, a steep fall from the 64 percent it won four years ago. But opposition parties and independent observers say even that result was inflated by vote-rigging, including alleged ballot-box stuffing and false voter rolls....
Source: WaPo
December 7, 2011
HELENA, Mont. — A case before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday over who owns the riverbeds beneath 10 Montana dams has drawn intense interest because of the potential effects on property rights, public access and wildlife management — but it has also spurred debate among historians as both sides reach more than 200 years into the past to bolster their arguments.PPL Montana is appealing a Montana Supreme Court ruling that the state owns the submerged land beneath 10 dams sitting on three Montana rivers, and that the company owes Montana tens of millions of dollars in rent....
Source: WaPo
December 6, 2011
Around 8 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941, Army Private Francis Stueve sat down to breakfast with the rest of the 89th Field Artillery battalion, stationed at Pearl Harbor.“As quiet a day as you’ve ever seen,” Stueve remembers now. “Beautiful sunshine, nothing going on.”Suddenly, not far from his seat in the dining hall: bang, bang, bang.“Somebody says, ‘It’s the Chinese New Year,’ ” he said.But then, a bullet broke through the glass window of the dining hall. Another flew just past Stueve and knocked the butter dish off the table.Japan’s official declaration of war would come a day later, after the loss of 160 aircraft, 12 ships and 2,300 Americans, according to the Library of Congress — 70 years ago on Wednesday. Stueve, now 94, can describe his experience as if it were happening now...
Source: NYT
December 6, 2011
HONOLULU — For more than half a century, members of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association gathered here every Dec. 7 to commemorate the attack by the Japanese that drew the United States into World War II. Others stayed closer to home for more intimate regional chapter ceremonies, sharing memories of a day they still remember in searing detail.But no more. The 70th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack will be the last one marked by the survivors’ association. With a concession to the reality of time — of age, of deteriorating health and death — the association will disband on Dec. 31.“We had no choice,” said William H. Eckel, 89, who was once the director of the Fourth Division of the survivors’ association, interviewed by telephone from Texas. “Wives and family members have been trying to keep it operating, but they just can’t do it. People are winding up in nursing homes and intensive care places.”...
Source: AP
December 5, 2011
NEW YORK – After a year of tough negotiations, Germany has agreed to pay pensions to about 16,000 additional Holocaust victims worldwide -- mostly survivors who were once starving children in Nazi ghettos, or were forced to live in hiding for fear of death.The agreement announced Monday between the New York-based Claims Conference and the German government is "not about money -- it's about Germany's acknowledgment of these people's suffering," said Greg Schneider, the conference's executive vice president."They're finally getting recognition of the horrors they endured as children," he told The Associated Press.Of the new beneficiaries, 5,000 live in the United States....
Source: Huffington Post
December 5, 2011
WASHINGTON -- A new film on the life and death of master spy and former CIA director William E. Colby, created by his son, raises the question of whether the man who pioneered U.S. counterinsurgency warfare may have ended his own life -- a question that has divided the intelligence community and Colby's family.Colby developed the strategy of training and arming local troops to assist with counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War -- the same tactic in use today by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. But as former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft speculates in the film, "The Man Nobody Knew," Colby's role in the creation of U.S. counterintelligence programs in the Vietnam War may have contributed to his suffering "a tortured soul."If this alleged remorse were real, and had any connection to Colby's death, it could cast a shadow over the early history of U.S. counterinsurgency.When Colby vanished in rough waters on a late-night, solo canoe trip in 1996, local sheriffs ruled out suicide before they even found his body. A lifetime of espionage meant Colby had enemies from Baltimore to Bali, and conspiracy theories about his death still circulate between Georgetown mansions and CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., today, despite an official ruling of accidental death....
Source: Medievalists.net
December 2, 2011
The flanks of Ingleborough in the Yorkshire Dales National Park have given up one of their secrets to a team of amateur archaeologists.Members of the Ingleborough Archaeology Group spent weeks investigating a remote site on the side of one of the National Park’s famous Three Peaks to the west of Selside in Upper Ribblesdale.And their work has resulted in the discovery of the first 7th century building to be positively identified in the National Park – and one of the first in the north of England....
Source: Press Release
December 6, 2011
THE ATLANTIC TO PUBLISH A COMMEMORATIVE ISSUE MARKING THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE START OF THE CIVIL WAR
Special Issue Features an Introduction by President Barack Obama, Plus Classic Stories by Mark Twain, Henry James, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Among Others
The Issue Also Includes Iconic Images From the National Portrait Gallery
Source: CNN.com
December 4, 2011
(CNN) -- For 70 years, survivors of the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor have captivated listeners with their firsthand accounts, recalling buddies who died in their arms or the glasses worn by a low-flying Japanese pilot.They have participated in solemn wreath-laying ceremonies and spoken to civic groups and school children about the infamous day and the need for the United States to remain vigilant.But the gradual loss of the World War II generation has accelerated, and this year, perhaps more than any before it, evidence of a tide change is inescapable.The Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, founded in 1958, is dissolving December 31. The passing of time, the difficulty in finding chapter officers and the health of its 2,700 members have taken their toll....
Source: BBC News
December 5, 2011
A British author is claiming to have unearthed a previously unseen portrait of Pride And Prejudice writer Jane Austen.Dr Paula Byrne, the author of a new book on Austen, was given the portrait by her husband and recognised the long, straight "Austen nose".There are currently just two recognised portraits of Austen - one sketched by her sister Cassandra in 1810.The find is the subject of a BBC Two documentary scheduled for Boxing Day.Byrne - who has previously written books on poet Mary Robinson and author Evelyn Waugh - was presented with the portrait by her husband, Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, who had bought it at auction....
Source: AP
December 5, 2011
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Almost 70 years after the United States struck Japan in a bold bombing raid that did little damage but lifted the spirits of a Pearl Harbor-weary nation, Thomas Griffin relishes the role he played that day as a navigator in one of Jimmy Doolittle's B-25s."It was risky, but we all wanted to do it," Griffin said. "Everybody was ready to go after Pearl Harbor."Coming just four months after the Imperial Japanese Navy savaged the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, and with U.S. defense of the Philippines crumbling, the April 18, 1942, raid on Japan's home islands electrified a world at war.Griffin, 96 and now living in Cincinnati, and three other survivors of the raid will be featured at a National World War II Museum symposium Wednesday through Friday focusing on the early months of American response to the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor....
Source: NYT
December 4, 2011
Down, down, down you go, for two and a half hours, jammed with two other people in a tiny submersible, all the way to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean — and all for a glimpse, through a five- or eight-inch porthole, of the ravaged remains of the once-grand ship where the Astors and the Strauses played, dined and, in some cases, died.The trip is not for the claustrophobic, nor the 99 percent: a two-week cruise that includes one dive, lasting eight to 10 hours, costs $60,000.But for fans of the Titanic, no price or privation is too great — especially with the 100th anniversary of the sinking coming up on April 15.“This is the opportunity of a lifetime,” Renata Rojas, a banker in New York City, said of diving more than two miles down to the muddy seabed. “I’ve been obsessed with the Titanic since I was 10 years old.”...
Source: NYT
December 4, 2011
Since 2000, Ms. [Mi-Li] Lee has campaigned to generate more interest in the fate of tens of thousands of South Koreans believed to have been forcibly taken to North Korea during the Korean War six decades ago. She has been demanding that the government negotiate for the return of those who may still be alive and the remains of those who are not. Government officials have never made that issue a priority when they have sat down with their North Korean counterparts, treating her campaign as a distraction from what they consider a more important task: persuading the North to abandon its nuclear weapons.But Ms. Lee, 62, is not giving up, and recently she has scored some victories against what she calls “a gigantic darkness and forgetfulness.”...
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
December 2, 2011
Argentina has proposed sending its athletes to the London Olympics wearing provocative badges declaring the Falklands are Argentine.It wants an image of the islands to be emblazoned on national team clothing at the Games, which will be held just weeks after Britain commemorates the 30th anniversary of the Falklands conflict.Athletes’ shirts would also bear the legend ‘Las Islas Malvinas son Argentinas’ – the Falklands Islands are Argentine. Malvinas is the Spanish name for the islands....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
December 2, 2011
Almost half the German city of Koblenz is under evacuation orders as experts prepare to defuse a two-ton ‘Blockbuster’ RAF bomb in the Rhine.The 10ft bomb, one of the biggest in the wartime arsenal of Bomber Command, was discovered after 65 years when the river level dropped during the driest November on record.The fuse is badly corroded, and the authorities are evacuating 45,000 of Koblenz’s 120,000 population to leave a security zone of a mile around the bomb - which is capable of destroying an entire city block.The evacuation - the biggest in German postwar history - will involve fleets of buses and 1,000 volunteers helping police and firemen....
Source: CzechPosition.com
December 1, 2011
The discovery of human remains in a mass grave near the village of Dobronín in western Moravia in August 2010 led to the launch of a historical criminal investigation — and sparked an emotional and divisive national debate about reprisals against Sudeten Germans at the end of World War II in then-Czechoslovakia. Police now have the results of DNA tests on the remains of the 13 males between the age of 30 and 60 — allegedly the victims of a violent death — and samples from their potential descendents. Since the discovery, the mass grave outside Dobronín has become the subject of contentious speculation, with several versions of events circulating, but to date practically no bona fide evidence has emerged to substantiate them.
