Breaking News

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: NYT
October 25, 2011

Comparing today's top income earners to yesteryear's

...Making precise comparisons to earlier periods can be difficult: Some income and wealth numbers are estimates, and income is only one way of measuring wealth. Still, there are some notable ways to measure gilded ages.In the late 1890s, when the average American worker’s weekly wage was less than $10, John D. Rockefeller was earning about $192,000 a week. When he died in 1937, the estimated annual investment return on his $1.4 billion wealth produced an income equal to that of about 116,000 American workers, according to Branko Milanovic, lead economist for the World Bank research group and the author of “The Haves and the Have-Nots.” Today, Bill Gates’s annual income equals that of about 75,000 workers.“If you compare Rockefeller’s income and the average income in the United States, then the gap was even greater in those days,” Dr. Milanovic said. “In the 1920s, though, the overall distribution of income is about the same as now in terms of inequality — very high.”J. Bradford DeLong, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, largely agreed. “Because the economy was smaller back then, fewer people — John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan — were more powerful in the country,” he said....

Source: NYT
October 26, 2011

Qaddafi, Son and Former Defense Aide Buried in Secret Place

MISURATA, Libya — After four days on public display in a meat locker here, the slowly decomposing corpses of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, one of his sons and his former defense minister were buried in a predawn funeral at a secret location on Tuesday, a top military official said.The official, Ibrahim Beitalmal, leader of the military intelligence branch in Misurata, said relatives of the three men, including a nephew of Colonel Qaddafi, Mahmoud Hamid, were permitted to attend the burials. Cellphone photos of the ceremony showed three bodies wrapped in white shrouds and placed in coffins of thin wood.Mr. Beitalmal declined to specify where the bodies of Colonel Qaddafi; his son Muatassim; and the former defense minister, Abu Bakr Younes, had been interred....

Source: WaPo
October 25, 2011

Wal-Mart gives $5 million to help build Smithsonian black history museum on National Mall

WASHINGTON — Wal-Mart donated $5 million Tuesday to help build the Smithsonian Institution’s planned National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall.The gift makes the world’s largest retailer one of the project’s “founding donors” who have given more than $1 million.Construction is scheduled to begin next year for a $500 million museum on a five-acre site near the Washington Monument next year. The project is on track to open in fall 2015, Museum Director Lonnie Bunch said Tuesday.“This opens the door for even more corporations to give money and give support,” Bunch said of Wal-Mart’s gift. “We’re looking for entities that care about questions of diversity and education in America’s history.”...

Source: Guardian (UK)
October 26, 2011

Biggest U.S. nuclear bomb dismantled in Texas

The last of the nation's biggest nuclear bombs, a Cold War relic 600 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, has been dismantled in what one energy official called a milestone in President Barack Obama's mission to rid the world of nuclear weapons.Workers in Texas separated the roughly 300lb (136kg) of high explosives inside from the special nuclear material – uranium – known as the pit.The work was done outside of public view for security reasons, but explosives from a bomb taken apart earlier were detonated as officials and reporters watched from less than a mile (1.6 kilometers) away.The deputy secretary of energy, Daniel Poneman, called the disassembly "a milestone accomplishment." The completion of the dismantling programme is a year ahead of schedule, according to the US Department of Energy's national nuclear security administration, and aligns with Obama's goal of reducing the number of nuclear weapons.

Source: Science Daily
October 20, 2011

Ancient Depiction of Childbirth Discovered at Etruscan Site in Tuscany

ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2011) — An archaeological excavation at Poggio Colla, the site of a 2,700-year-old Etruscan settlement in Italy's Mugello Valley, has turned up a surprising and unique find: two images of a woman giving birth to a child.Researchers from the Mugello Valley Archaeological Project, which oversees the Poggio Colla excavation site some 20 miles northeast of Florence, discovered the images on a small fragment from a ceramic vessel that is more than 2,600 years old.The images show the head and shoulders of a baby emerging from a mother represented with her knees raised and her face shown in profile, one arm raised, and a long ponytail running down her back.The excavation is a project of Southern Methodist University, Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Penn., and the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, in collaboration with The Open University in Milton Keynes, England....

Source: Discovery News
October 25, 2011

Land-dwelling species were decimated during Earth’s most massive extinction event -- offering a cautionary tale.

About 252 million years ago, Earth experienced its most devastating extinction in the history of life on our planet. And while scientists have long known that more than 80 percent of ocean-dwelling species disappeared, they have long debated what happened on land.Now, researchers are reporting that land-dwelling species were equally decimated during the extinction, which ended an era called the Permian period. After the massive wave of devastation swept through, just a few "disaster" species remained, including a handful of large four-legged creatures, a new study found.Recovery, the study also found, was slow. Animals that survived the near-apocalypse remained on the edge of collapse for the next eight million years, before the food supply stabilized again.As we enter what appears to be the Earth’s sixth major extinction event, the new findings emphasize the value of having a wide range of creatures around, and more warnings of the danger of letting too many species disappear....

Source: BBC
October 25, 2011

'Error' in crashed World War II U.S. bomber flight record

A US bomber which crashed in Scotland during World War II may not have been on the plane's officially recorded flightpath, according to an archaeologist.All nine crew of the B-17G Flying Fortress were killed when the aircraft clipped cliffs and crashed in Trotternish, on Skye, on 3 March 1945.Terence Christian, of the University of Glasgow, led an investigation at the site earlier this year.He said there was evidence backing islanders' recollections of the crash.Fresh from training, the crew were flying the B-17G bomber from the US via Iceland to RAF Valley in Wales....

Source: Maritime Executive
October 24, 2011

13th Century Mongolian Shipwreck Found off Nagasaki

Okinawa Prefecture's University of the Ryukyus has announced that large parts of a Mongolian ship presumed to have been part of a 13th century Yuan Dynasty-era invasion fleet has been discovered on the seafloor near Nagasaki.  The find is the first intact wreck related to invasion attempts of Japan by the Mongolian ruler, Kublai Khan.The archaeology team, headed by Yoshifumi Ikeda, found the near complete hull structure about 1-meter under the seabed, and about 20-25 meters beneath the ocean’s surface off the Takashima Island in Matsuura Nagasaki.  The discovery is so monumental because much of the hull has remained intact, including a 12-meter section of the keels with rows of planks attached to the keel, Ikeda reported.  The vessel appears to be well preserved due to the cover of sand.

Source: AP
October 25, 2011

House votes to honor first black Marines

WASHINGTON — The nation's first black Marines received a rare national tribute Tuesday as the House voted to award the Montford Point Marines with the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian honor given by Congress.History books and Hollywood have chronicled the Army's Buffalo Soldiers and the Army Air Corps' Tuskegee Airmen, but the men who integrated the Marines during World War II often have been forgotten. That is starting to change, beginning with the House's 422-0 vote.The black Marines received their basic training adjacent to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, where conditions were harsh and the treatment from their fellow Marines could be even harsher....

Source: NYT
October 25, 2011

Next for Newport Preservation: Gilded-Age Beeches

NEWPORT, R.I. — In the Gilded Age, the rich built marble palaces here, surrounding them with exotic trees they acquired with the same ardor they brought to assembling their fabulous collections of art.Their favorites were European beeches — green, copper and weeping beeches — trees they prized for their dramatic shapes and colors. Soon the streets of Newport’s mansion district were filled with the trees.Today, many of them tower as high as 80 feet. “They are icons of Newport, the signature trees of the Gilded Age,” said John R. Tschirch, an architectural historian who directs conservation programs at the Preservation Society of Newport County, which owns many of the mansions.But the trees are in trouble. Planted more or less all at once about 120 years ago, they are aging all at once now, a process hastened by insect and fungus infestations they can no longer fight off. Though the mansion district’s main street, Bellevue Avenue, looks almost as elegant as ever, here and there stands a skeleton tree, bereft of leaves, or a stump perhaps five feet across, all that remains of a vanished giant....

Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 24, 2011

Sir Francis Drake's final fleet 'discovered off the coast of Panama'

His burial at sea in full armour and in a lead casket was designed to ensure that no one – but especially the Spanish – would find his body.Now, more than 400 years after Sir Francis Drake's death in the Caribbean, the great seafarer's watery grave may be close to being discovered.A team of treasure hunters led by an American former basketball team owner claims to have discovered two ships from Drake's fleet lying on the seabed off the coast of Panama. The 195-ton Elizabeth and 50-ton Delight were scuttled shortly after the naval hero's death from dysentery, aged about 55, in 1596. It is thought that Drake's final resting place may be nearby.Pat Croce, a former president of the Philadelphia 76ers and self-professed "pirate aficionado", embarked on a search for the ships after researching a book on the latter part of Drake's career, as a privateer plundering Spanish ships in the New World....

Source: International Business Times
October 23, 2011

Apple iPod Turns 10, A History of Change Over a Decade

Could you believe it has been a decade since Apple and Steve Jobs first introduced the iPod, changing history and the way we listen to music for the past 10 years?The iPod was the first MP3 portable digital music player, boasting 10 hours of battery life and capability to hold up to 1,000 songs, to make a break in the market and catch mass appeal in the mainstream. Apple, particularly the late former CEO Steve Jobs, spearheaded the digital music revolution with iPods and the iTunes store.Since its announcement 10 years ago Sunday, on Oct. 23, 2001, Apple has sold over 321 million iPods since it hit the market on Nov. 10, 2001, according to Apple's fourth quarter results recorded in October."This is a major, major breakthrough," Jobs said at an event in Apple's headquarters 10 years ago today....

Source: USA Today
October 23, 2011

Google Earth reveals ancient stories

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," science fiction author Arthur Clarke once suggested.Say a magic carpet and a genie's lamp, the stuff of Arabian Nights, which made the Arab desert famous for fables and legends?Well, how about Google Earth instead? Like a friendly genie, that modern technology has started answering archeologist's wishes with its worldwide catalog of satellite views of the Earth. A pair of studies in the Journal of Archaelogical Science this year suggest these views are revealing a vast and ancient story, one only starting to emerge from the fabled desert of Arabia.

Source: Reuters
October 24, 2011

Wall collapse in Pompeii renews worries for site

ROME (Reuters) - Part of a Roman wall in Pompeii's ancient ruins has collapsed, authorities said on Saturday, a year after a gladiator house in the site crumbled and embarrassed Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government.A chunk of the exterior of a perimeter wall in the Porta Nola area crumbled overnight between Thursday and Friday after bad weather in the area, Pompeii's archaeological superintendent department said in a statement.The collapse involved a roughly four metre-by-two metre (four yard-by-two yard) portion of wall in an area that is less frequented by tourists.The damage was "limited and contained", the statement said....

Source: Jewish Daily Forward
October 24, 2011

Washington's First Letter to Jews Is Lost

Savannah, Ga. — Just a little more than a year after George Washington became America’s first president, Levi Sheftall, a Jew from Savannah, wrote him a letter. Sheftall, president of Congregation Mickve Israel, congratulated Washington on behalf of his fellow Savannah Jews, who had high hopes for religious freedom in their new country.But as if to prove that even in its infancy, American Jewry was rife with jealousy and infighting, this seemingly innocuous letter caused an uproar.Why was Savannah first, Jews in other communities wanted to know. Congregations in New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, S.C. and Richmond, Va. soon remedied the matter, sending a joint letter of congratulation to Washington. But not before the Jews of Newport, R.I., had sent a letter of their own. The rest is history.Washington’s famous reply to the Jews of Newport, in which he vowed that America would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” continues to resonate today as an American pledge of religious freedom, even though the document disappeared from public view 10 years ago. As the Forward reported earlier this year, it is owned by a private foundation and currently held in an art storage facility in suburban Maryland....

Source: Jewish Daily Forward
October 24, 2011

Jewish Chaplains Get Memorial of Own

When the USS Dorchester, a U.S. Army troop ship carrying 900 soldiers and civilians, was attacked by the Germans in 1943, a rabbi, a Catholic priest and two Protestant ministers helped soldiers onto lifeboats and handed out life jackets, giving away their own as the ship sank off the coast of Greenland. The four chaplains were seen singing hymns and holding hands until the very end.Yet Rabbi Alexander Goode was the only one of the Immortal Chaplains, as they came to be known, not honored with a memorial. That is, until now.On October 24, a ceremony at the Memorial Amphitheater at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia will dedicate the first monument on Chaplains Hill, commemorating Goode and 13 other Jewish chaplains killed on active duty in America’s armed forces.“We decided that all four needed to be honored,” said the project’s originator, Ken Kraetzer, commander of Squadron 50 of the Sons of the American Legion. Kraetzer was searching for the names of all four lost chaplains at Chaplains Hill when he realized not only that Goode’s name was missing, but also that there was no monument to Jewish chaplains at all....

Source: AP
October 24, 2011

Marine Corps to teach story of first black Marines

OCEANSIDE, Calif. (AP) — Oscar Culp does not like to remember. His mind has erased the harshest details. But the pain still stings for the 87-year-old WWII veteran, who endured boot camp in a snake-infested North Carolina swampland as one of the first blacks admitted to the Marine Corps.He wipes a tear. Black Marines were barred from being stationed with whites at nearby Camp Lejeune. But what hurt worse, he says, was returning from the battlefield to a homeland that ordered him to sit at the back of the bus and drink out of separate fountains from the white Americans he had just put his life on the line to protect."Excuse me," he says, pulling out a handkerchief. "Sometimes we get a little emotional about it."The story of the first black Marines is a part of history few Americans — and even few Marines — have learned. Unlike the Army's Buffalo Soldiers or the Air Force's Tuskegee Airmen, the Montford Point Marines have never been featured in popular songs or Hollywood films, or recognized nationally.The Corps' new commandant intends to change that....

Source: AP
October 24, 2011

150 years ago, a primitive Internet united the USA

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Long before there was an Internet or an iPad, before people were social networking and instant messaging, Americans had already gotten wired.Monday marks the 150th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental telegraph. From sea to sea, it electronically knitted together a nation that was simultaneously tearing itself apart, North and South, in the Civil War.Americans soon saw that a breakthrough in the spread of technology could enhance national identity and, just as today, that it could vastly change lives."It was huge," says Amy Fischer, archivist for Western Union, which strung the line across mountains, canyons and tribal lands to make the final connection. "... With the Civil War just a few months old, the idea that California, the growing cities of California, could talk to Washington and the East Coast in real time was huge. It's hard to overstate the impact of that."...

Source: Star Tribune
October 24, 2011

Ransacked Minnesota historic site to be reborn as park

A parcel of land that's one of Minnesota's most historic sites and considered sacred to some American Indians sits littered with glass, rusting debris and trashed buildings covered with graffiti and paintball splatters.But beginning next month, excavators and other heavy equipment will level all 12 buildings on the land between Fort Snelling and Minnehaha Park, the first step in restoring the area to create a new national park addition.The federal property, 27 acres formerly owned by the U.S. Bureau of Mines, contains the Coldwater Spring area that was part of one of the longest protests in state history in the late 1990s. Its transfer to the National Park Service in January 2010 and planned restoration is a turning point in what has been a long and sorry decline for the property, which has been vacant, neglected and ransacked during the past 15 years."It's terrific that such a potentially complicated and controversial situation has resolved itself very nicely," said Whitney Clark, executive director of Friends of the Mississippi River, which advocates for the river and its shoreline....

Source: NYT
October 22, 2011

In Memoir, Rice Tells of Clashes With Cheney

Condoleezza Rice clashed repeatedly with Vice President Dick Cheney over what to do with captured terrorism suspects and at one point even threatened to resign when she felt circumvented, according to a memoir of her time in Washington, due out next month.In the book, Ms. Rice provides a vivid account of the tumultuous years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, when the Bush administration struggled to reinvent the national security structure to protect the country from a new kind of enemy. Along the way, she writes, the president’s team disagreed sometimes heatedly....