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: Wales Online (UK)
December 1, 2011
THE Welsh Government has accused the National Library of Wales of putting its reputation “at risk” after accepting a £300,000 donation from a known Nazi collaborator.Louis Feutren was a leading member of Breton groups who worked with the Nazis after their invasion of France during the Second World War.After he died in 2010, he bequeathed a collection of papers and tapes to the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, along with a financial donation worth £300,000.After leaving Brittany, Feutren had travelled through Wales on his way to Ireland, where he eventually settled....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
December 1, 2011
A rusty pocket knife Lawrence of Arabia is thought to have used in his desert campaign during World War One is going up for sale.The Victorian-era knife was made by Royal cutlers Underwood and Farrant that produced them before the Swiss Army version became popular.And historians are wondering whether this early multi-tooled blade proved invaluable to the war hero as he battled the Turks in the deserts of Arabia.It was found in the garden of Clouds Hill, Lawrence's home near Bovington in Dorset, where the mysterious hero was living when he died after crashing his Brough Superior motorbike in 1935.The knife has the initials TEL - for Thomas Edward Lawrence - burned into the wooden handle, a technique Lawrence used on many of his possessions....
Source: Local (DE)
November 1, 2011
These days, throwing unwanted objects into your toilet can clog it, but 11th-century Bavarians apparently weren’t bothered by such concerns. An archaeological dig behind Munich’s Marienplatz square has unearthed a medieval latrine full of items dating back a thousand years. The discovery “astonished” Dr Barbara Wührer, who was hired by railway operator Deutsche Bahn to excavate the area covering the size of a football pitch in the oldest part of the Bavarian capital. While the dig continues, Wührer is in charge of documenting the findings. When it’s over, Deutsche Bahn will begin to dig tunnels 40 metres underneath the Marienhof for a new S-Bahn commuter train line.
Source: Discovery News
November 30, 2011
Oscar Wilde's renovated Paris tomb was unveiled on Wednesday, complete with a new glass barrier to shield the monument to the quintessential dandy's life from a torrent of admiring kisses.Kiss upon lipsticked kiss in honor of Wilde, who died penniless aged 46 in a Paris hotel room in 1900, had worn down the elegant tomb in Pere Lachaise cemetery, as grease from tourist lips sank into the stonework.Wilde's only grandson Merlin Holland and British actor Rupert Everett accompanied French and Irish officials at the ceremony, held under bright winter sunshine on the tree-lined alleys of the famous burial ground.The tomb, designed by modernist sculptor Jacob Epstein with a flying Assyrian-style angel, survived almost unscathed until 1985, except for the angel's notoriously prominent genitals being hacked off....
Source: Nature
December 1, 2011
Geneticists, archaeologists and historians are joining forces to investigate the history of transatlantic slavery, in a €4.3-million (US$5.8-million) project launched today. The researchers say that the project is a unique opportunity to improve our knowledge of the slave trade, but warn that some of their results might be “uncomfortable”.Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, millions of people from west and central Africa were captured and shipped across the Atlantic by European slave traders to a life of forced labour in the Americas. The subject has been well studied by historians, but one of the coordinators of the project, geneticist Hannes Schroeder of the Center for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, says that there are still “large gaps in our knowledge” regarding the origins of the people captured as slaves, for instance, and how the slave trade operated.“The historical records are fragmentary,” he says. “For example, they tend to mention just the port of export, rather than the ethnic or geographical origin of the person. The idea is that by bringing in genetics, we get a different view.”...
Source: Washington Times
November 30, 2011
Well, that didn’t take long.Early in October, staffers from the Smithsonian Museum of American History went through the Occupy Wall Street encampment in New York’s Zucotti Park collecting hand-made posters and other material to build up a record of the embryonic movement in case the protesters end up in the history books - and not just in jail for unlawful assembly and messing up public spaces.As the Occupy protest widened to other cities, so did the museum’s search. But museum officials declined to go into detail about what was being collected and from where.Valeska M. Hilbig, deputy director of public affairs, referred to a museum statement that puts the initiative in the context of similar recent efforts. “The protests are still ongoing, and things are still unfolding,” Ms. Hilbig told The Washington Times. “Historians like to take the long view and see how things play out. They wouldn’t feel comfortable to discuss it until they have had a chance to get the historic perspective.”...
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
December 1, 2011
Cavemen began colonising the rest of the world 30,000 years earlier than previously thought, archaeologists claim.They have found a treasure trove of stone tools which provide the ‘smoking gun’ showing humans made their way out of Africa more than 100,000 years ago. It was previously thought to be between 40,000 and 70,000.An international team lead by Dr. Jeffrey Rose of Birmingham University found the distinctive sharp tools, used to kill prey, at more than 100 sites in what is now Oman, in the Arabian Peninsula.They are from the Nubian, or Middle Stone Age period, evidence of which has previously only been found in central Africa and provides a ‘trail of stone breadcrumbs’ showing their expansion route....
Source: The Press Association
November 29, 2011
Four million newspaper pages have been put online as part of a massive history project.The British Newspaper Archive website includes pages from more than 200 different papers from across the UK and Ireland with first hand accounts of events including the wedding of Victoria and Albert and the Charge of the Light Brigade.Ed King, the British Library's Head of Newspapers, said it opened up the collection "as never before".He said: "Rather than having to view the items on site at the Library, turning each page, people across the UK and around the world will be able to explore for themselves the goldmine of stories and information contained in these pages - and the ability to search across millions of articles will yield results for each user, that might previously have been the work of weeks or months, in a matter of seconds and the click of a mouse."...
Source: NewsChannel5.com (TN)
November 7, 2011
FRANKLIN, Tenn. – The effort to reclaim Civil War battlefields in Franklin celebrated another victory this week. Thanks to a group of neighbors, the Civil War Trust was able to purchase a 5 acre tract of land near the Carnton Plantation.Ten years ago, a group of neighbors living near Adams Street got together, pooled their money, and purchased a piece of land to keep developers away.Little did they know at the time that their decision to preserve green space would end up protecting history too.Wallace Jolsin was a part of the group that paid $240,000 to purchase the land known as Loring's Advance tract....
Source: AP
November 30, 2011
MEXICO CITY (AP) — The end is not near.At least that's according to a German expert who says his decoding of a Mayan tablet with a reference to a 2012 date denotes a transition to a new era and not a possible end of the world as others have read it.The interpretation of the hieroglyphs by Sven Gronemeyer of La Trobe University in Australia was presented for the first time Wednesday at the archaeological site of Palenque in southern Mexico.His comments came less than a week after Mexico's archaeology institute acknowledged there was a second reference to the 2012 date in Mayan inscriptions, touching of another round of talk about whether it predicts the end of the world....
Source: NYT
November 30, 2011
After 165 years, Knoedler & Company, one of the oldest and most prestigious art galleries in the country, is permanently closing its doors. Opened at a time when there were no major museums in New York, Knoedler helped shape the tastes as well as decorate the homes of America’s new class of wealthy barons.Although the gallery’s history is long and expansive, its statement Wednesday evening about closing was short and sudden: “It is with profound regret that the owners of Knoedler Gallery announce its closing, effective today. This was a business decision made after careful consideration over the course of an extended period of time. Gallery staff will assist with an orderly winding down of Knoedler Gallery.”Nothing was said about what will happen to one of Knoedler’s most valuable properties: an enormous library that includes letters, photographs, sale records, stock books and catalogs going back to 1863....
Source: Fox
November 30, 2011
Government lawyers told a federal judge Wednesday that the man who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981 went to a bookstore recently where he perused books on Reagan and people who've tried to assassinate presidents.
Source: WaPo
November 21, 2011
Gregg Schwarz frowned as he positioned himself, just so, in front of the wrought iron fence surrounding John Edgar Hoover’s grave, a place he has visited countless times but never before in anger.A retired FBI agent who joined the agency in 1972, the year Hoover died, Schwarz had hired a videographer to film him for YouTube expressing his displeasure with a movie that depicted Hoover as a repressed homosexual. In a dig at Clint Eastwood, the director of “J. Edgar,” Schwarz titled his video response, “Dirty Harry to Filthy Harry.”“Mr. Hoover was portrayed as an individual who had homosexual tendencies and was a tyrannical monster,” Schwarz said into the camera, as the sun glinted off his FBI cuff links and FBI lapel pin. “That is simply not true.”
Source: Kerryman.ie
November 30, 2011
A CAUSEWAY man is facing a possible five-year jail term after he was prosecuted for demolishing an ancient ring fort on land belonging to his family.In the first case of its kind to be heard in an Irish Court, John O'mahony with an address at Clashmealcon, Causeway appeared at Tralee Circuit Criminal Court last where he pleaded guilty to carrying out unauthorised work near a monument on his family's farmland in Causeway in 2008.The court heard that the family of Mr O'mahony, a 64-year-old farmer, owned lands which contained a ring fort and a series of underground tunnels, or souterrains, which dated back to between 500 and 100AD.The ring fort and souterrain system were deemed to be national monuments of historic importance and had been placed on a national register....
Source: WSJ
November 29, 2011
ALBANY, N.Y. — They ranged in age from 20 to 45, stood between just over 5 feet 3 inches to 5 feet 9 inches tall, and most of them were male and intact, except for the one missing its skull.Five years after human skeletons were uncovered on a historic island in the upper Hudson River by a husband-and-wife team of amateur archaeologists, New York state officials are revealing what professional archaeologists learned from the remains.Evidence found in seven unmarked graves unearthed on Rogers Island in 2006 suggests the site was a military cemetery during the French and Indian War, according to archaeologists at the New York State Museum, which was contracted by the property's owner to examine the remains. The state Department of Education, which operates the museum, recently released the archaeologists' findings to The Associated Press.Christina Rieth, the state's chief archaeologist, believes the site in the village of Fort Edward likely contains a large cemetery dating back to the 1750s, when Britain established its largest fortification in North America on the east bank of the upper Hudson, 45 miles north of Albany. Lisa Anderson, one of the state archaeologists who examined the remains, agreed....
Source: Today's Zaman
November 27, 2011
The Boğazköy Sphinx, one of two sphinxes that were taken to Germany for restoration during World War I, has finally returned home. After being away for 94 years and following many diplomatic struggles, both of the sphinxes, the first of which was returned by Germany some time between 1924 and 1937, are now on display at Boğazköy Museum. Ertuğrul Günay, the minister of culture and tourism, has said he places great importance on the return of the sphinx to its homeland, saying, “This is a historic day for archeology in Turkey.”
Turkey, being a very rich country archeologically, is among the leading countries that have been spending the most on archeology in recent years, and continues to make efforts toward the return of artifacts belonging to civilizations that lived in what is today’s Turkey. Nearly 1,900 artifacts have been returned to Turkey this year and over 3,000 relics have been returned since 2007, more than 1,000 of which were coins....
Source: LiveScience
November 28, 2011
Artificial-intelligence networks could help pinpoint new fossil sites across thousands of square miles of desert, scientists have found.
Source: Discovery News
November 29, 2011
American politics has long been rocked with scandal, but none are more potent than the presidential sex scandal.Since the dawn of the United States, there have been rumors and conjecture about everyone from President Thomas Jefferson to presidential candidates like Herman Cain or John Edwards. The campaign for the office of the president is a difficult road, even more so with media scrutiny, but when the public discover a sexual mishap, those involved feel the fallout.Presidential candidates' sexual indiscretions, once known, are widely publicized, and often politicized, but how many have there been? Suffice it to say a lot. Here are five presidential, or presidential candidate, sex scandals that we at Discovery News find most interesting.#5 Presidential Candidate Wilbur MillsRepresentative Wilbur Mills (D-Ark.) was a powerful Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee for 18 years (1957-1975). His position made him very a powerful figure in the U.S. House of Representatives, which made him well known in the District of Columbia.
Source: Egypt Independent
November 30, 2011
One of Egypt’s most celebrated contemporary artists, Wael Shawky, makes work of a grand and complicated scale. His recent half-hour long film “Cabaret Crusade: The Horror File” is the first installment in what he plans will be a four-part video narrative of the Crusades, starring marionettes.It was recently exhibited at the 12th Istanbul Biennale alongside large-scale, glossy photographs of the marionettes that raise them to the status of movie stars, and drawn and sculptural elements built out of the film’s visual language. Shawky has said that in his work he seeks to create a “hybridized society,” and he often presents familiar historical events, with altered rules and jarring pairings, employing child actors – or in this case puppets – to generate questions about contemporary social and cultural issues through contrasts.The artist has of late been showered with grants and awards, most notably the Abraaj Capital Art Prize, a Dubai-based prize through which artists receive funding for proposed projects to be exhibited at Art Dubai in March. Shawky was not at liberty to discuss from Marseille his plans for the Abraaj Capital exhibition. Yet, he spoke to us his current projects, including the next installment of “Cabaret Crusade.”...
Source: Spiegel Online
November 30, 2011
Preparations have already been made for Ernst Uhrlau's retirement party next Wednesday when he steps down from his post as the head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), Germany's foreign intelligence agency, on his 65th birthday. The office of the chancellor has selected a posh location in Berlin for his farewell party and Angela Merkel herself is expected to attend. Uhrlau, a member of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), will be turning over his post to Gerhard Schindler, a member of the business-friendly Free Democratic Party.At events like this, the successes of the person retiring are usually celebrated. In Uhrlau's case, topping the list are his efforts to review the problematic history of the BND's creation after World War II. It has long been known that around 10 percent of the employees at the BND and its predecessor organization once served under SS chief Heinrich Himmler in Nazi Germany. In 2011, Uhrlau appointed an independent commission of historians to research the agency's Nazi roots.
