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: Daily Caller
August 29, 2011
...Is there a correlation between success in the White House and a president’s perceived intelligence, or at least between academic performance and Oval Office success?American University historian Allan Lichtman told The Daily Caller that he believes so.“If you look at some of the least successful presidents,” he said, “they’re not exactly known for their [intellectual] prowess … Whereas the most brilliant of the presidents are all either very successful or at least reasonably successful.”How, then, does one explain Jimmy Carter, thought to be smart but generally considered a not-so-great president? What of Ronald Reagan, media-cast as an “amiable dunce” but considered by many to be a historically great chief executive?
Source: Government Executive
August 26, 2011
How do you move an 86-year-old skeleton across town? Hundreds of antique microscopes? A single lock of Abraham Lincoln's hair?This is the challenge the National Museum of Health and Medicine is facing. Under the direction of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission, which was instituted in 2005, the museum will be moving from the Walter Reed campus in Northwest Washington to its new location at the Forest Glen Annex in Silver Spring, Maryland.Many have been watching the museum's neighbor, the 102-year-old Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Currently the hospital is working to transfer a different type of precious cargo -- wounded soldiers -- to the newly constructed Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., and the Fort Belvoir Community Hospital in Virginia....
Source: NYT
August 27, 2011
TULSA, Okla. — The phones rattled with the sound of an explosion. It was Sept. 11, and some of the traders at an energy company here had been speaking with colleagues at a financial company in the World Trade Center in New York. Suddenly, routine business calls became frantic dictations of final messages to loved ones. Then the lines went dead.In a strange twist of fate, the office tower here where those messages were scribbled — rising 52 stories above this sprawling oil town — bears an eerie resemblance to those fallen twins in New York, one so striking that executives would joke that the architect who designed all three buildings had simply shrunk his blueprints.Ten years after those phone conversations, the emotions and fears are still raw half a nation away from the site of the terrorist attacks, refreshed daily by the familiar profile of One Williams Center. Some see the tower as an unplanned memorial. Others worry that it is a potential target.“There is still fear,” said Linda Wagner, an accounting clerk who works in the building. “We are a miniature version in the middle of the country.”...
Source: NYT
August 26, 2011
Stephen Fybish, a 74-year-old weather historian from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, celebrated his second birthday in Jackson Heights, Queens, on Sept. 20, 1938, the day before the great hurricane struck New York City. Nonetheless, his mother often proudly reminded him, everybody who was invited made it to his party.The 1938 storm, which claimed 600 lives in the Northeast, devastated eastern Long Island, but spared much of the city, which, Mr. Fybish recalled, was soaked by about five inches of rain over two days and whipped by 60 m.p.h. winds.Like other hurricanes, even that storm paled in comparison to the fiercest gale ever recorded, the one that that slammed the city head-on near what is now Kennedy International Airport on Sept. 3, 1821 — before Mr. Fybish’s time, he acknowledges. The tide rose 13 feet and the Hudson and East Rivers converged in lower Manhattan....
Source: Guardian (UK)
August 17, 2011
A national theatre of the north is found on summit of Studforth Hill in Aldborough.
The lost amphitheatre of northern England has been found on a Yorkshire hilltop in a discovery with major implications for the study of Roman Britain.
Centuries of speculation have ended with a printout from geomagnetic scanners which reveals a great tiered bank of seats below curving hummocks in a field now frequented only by a herd of cattle.
Crowning the summit of Studforth Hill, the oval arena would have combined spectacles and entertainments with a magnificent 360-degree view, making it the equivalent of a national theatre of the north.
The find by Cambridge University
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 18, 2011
Archaeologists believe they have found the first pre-Roman planned town in Britain which reveals Iron Age societies were far more sophisticated than previously thought.
The site, unearthed beneath Silchester near Reading, Berks, and will change the history books after originally thought the Romans were the first to bring civilised life to Britain.
After the Roman invasion, the town was used by its military, and there is evidence that Roman buildings were very swiftly built on top of Iron Age structures....
Source: BBC
August 24, 2011
Saudi officials say archaeologists have begun excavating a site that suggests horses were domesticated 9,000 years ago in the Arabian Peninsula.
The vice-president of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities said the discovery at al-Maqar challenged the theory it first took place 5,500 years ago in Central Asia.
Ali al-Ghabban said it also changed what was known about the evolution of culture in the late Neolithic period.
A number of artefacts were also found.
They included arrowheads, scrapers, grain grinders, tools for spinning and weaving, and other tools that showed the inhabitants were skilled at handicrafts.
Mr Ghabban said carbon-14 tests on the artefacts, as well as DNA tests on human remains also found there, dated them to about 7,000 BC....
Source: BBC
August 23, 2011
A druid who went to the High Court to try to stop researchers examining ancient human remains found at Stonehenge has failed in his legal bid.
King Arthur Pendragon wanted the remains found in 2008 to be reburied immediately.
He was fighting a Ministry of Justice decision allowing scientists at Sheffield University to analyse the samples for five more years.
His bid was rejected at a High Court hearing in London.
Mr Justice Wyn Williams refused to give Mr Pendragon permission to launch a judicial review action, ruling that there was insufficient evidence to show that the Ministry of Justice might have acted unreasonably....
Source: BBC
August 25, 2011
A small, 160-million-year-old Chinese fossil has something big to say about the emergence of mammals on Earth.
The shrew-like creature is the earliest known example of an animal whose kind evolved to provide nourishment to their unborn through a placenta.
Its features clearly set it apart from marsupial mammals, which adopt a very different reproductive strategy.
The discovery pushes back the date the two groups took up their separate lines, according to Nature magazine.
The journal carries a paper written by a team of palaeontologists led by Zhe-Xi Luo from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, US.
It describes the fossil remains of an animal unearthed in China's northeast Liaoning Province, which has produced so many stunning fossils in recent years....
Source: BBC
August 25, 2011
A judge in Chile has agreed to investigate the death in prison of Gen Alberto Bachelet during the rule of Gen August Pinochet in the 1970s.
Judge Mario Carroza will review a complaint brought by relatives of the victims of military rule alleging that Gen Bachelet was tortured to death.
Gen Bachelet was loyal to President Salvador Allende, deposed in a 1973 military coup led by Gen Pinochet.
Gen Bachelet's daughter Michelle became Chile's first female president in 2006.
A group representing the relatives of victims of Gen Augusto
Source: AP
August 14, 2011
KENNESAW, Ga. (AP) — The privately owned 16-acre tract on Burnt Hickory Road is thick with pines and young hardwoods, but little else of interest other than its role as a staging ground for a Civil War battle 147 years ago.The land's history has its next-door neighbor, Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, working to scrounge up $2.7 million to buy land. That's the asking price sought by the Cherokee County tract's private owners, who have put the land up for sale.The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Sunday that the site was crossed by Union troops in 1864 as they launched a key skirmish in the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain during Gen. William T. Sherman's march to the sea....
Source: AP
August 19, 2011
ELMIRA, N.Y. — U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has introduced legislation that would allow a Revolutionary War battlefield currently owned by New York state to become a national park.The measure introduced by the New York Democrat earlier this month would authorize the federal government to conduct a study to evaluate the significance of the Newtown Battlefield State Park, just outside the city of Elmira, and the impact of making it a national park.
Source: Helena Independent Record (MT)
August 19, 2011
LITTLE BIGHORN BATTLEFIELD NATIONAL MONUMENT (AP) — On a hot, nearly windless day in early August, Edwin C. Bearss is looking across the Little Bighorn River as he describes an early scene in the battle that would come to be known as Custer’s Last Stand. He is dressed in a ball cap, two T-shirts and a pair of stained khaki pants held up by an ancient leather belt. His hiking boots, by contrast, are sturdy and relatively new. He looks like a man who can’t be bothered by superfluities. A busload of tourists, who have come from around the country to follow Bearss (pronounced “Bars”) on a five-day tour that takes in several of the battles leading up to the climactic fight on the Little Bighorn, are listening carefully to his monologue, some of them taking notes. Bearss recounts details of the Battle of the Little Bighorn with a vivid immediacy, sometimes squeezing his eyes shut, as if imagining himself there on that fateful day of June 25, 1876. He is lean and not much more than average height, but the 88-year-old historian has a gruff, authoritative voice that commands attention. His face is deeply tanned and he is holding a swagger stick that is engraved with the names of Civil War battles and capped with a brass cartridge. He often gestures with it.
Source: Guardian (UK)
August 23, 2011
Archaeologists have discovered only the second known port of Roman Britain, where soldiers would have arrived in numbers from the Mediterranean to aid in the fight against some of the most stubborn and hostile of all the tribes they had to face.Over the last year, archaeologists have been digging near the Roman fortress of Caerleon, just north of Newport, south Wales, and have made some remarkable discoveries. On Tuesday, the site was declared the only known Roman British port outside London."It is extremely exciting," Peter Guest, leading the excavation team from Cardiff University, said. "What we have found exceeds all expectations. It now seems clear that we're looking at a new addition to our knowledge of Roman Britain."...
Source: Yahoo News
August 23, 2011
OKLAHOMA CITY (Reuters) - The nation's second-largest Indian tribe formally booted from membership thousands of descendants of black slaves who were brought to Oklahoma more than 170 years ago by Native American owners.The Cherokee nation voted after the Civil War to admit the slave descendants to the tribe.But on Monday, the Cherokee nation Supreme Court ruled that a 2007 tribal decision to kick the so-called "Freedmen" out of the tribe was proper.The controversy stems from a footnote in the brutal history of U.S. treatment of Native Americans. When many Indians were forced to move to what later became Oklahoma from the eastern U.S. in 1838, some who had owned plantations in the South brought along their slaves....
Source: East Anglian Daily Times (UK)
August 23, 2011
ALMOST 630 years of waiting are almost over as the face of Suffolk’s most iconic and tragic figure is set to be revealed.Forensic experts from Dundee University have been working to put a face to Simon Theobald of Sudbury who had his head hacked off by Watt Tyler’s rampaging mob during the peasant uprising in 1381 for his role in introducing the poll tax.In June the team removed the skull, which sits in a cubby hole in St Gregory’s Church, Sudbury, and took it to West Suffolk Hospital for a series of scans by a radiologist in the first phase of the process to reconstruct his face and reveal what he would have looked like....
Source: Political Wire
August 25, 2011
The New York Times "obtained" a copy of former Vice President Dick Cheney's memoir, In My Time, which is to be released next week and reports the book "opens with an account of Mr. Cheney's experiences during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he essentially commanded the government's response from a bunker beneath the White House while Mr. Bush -- who was away from Washington and hampered by communications breakdowns -- played a peripheral role. But Mr. Cheney wrote that he did not want to make any formal statement to the nation that day."...
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 24, 2011
Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, spoke of his pride at his historic achievement more than four decades ago during a rare public appearance in Australia. The former astronaut relived the moment he set foot on the lunar surface on July 21 1969 as he provided a personal commentary to attendees of an accounting seminar in Sydney.Speaking for more than hour on Wednesday, he told the crowd about the importance of team work and how risk taking contrasted to today’s “risk management” culture.The American, 81, also said he was in favour of establishing a permanent base on the moon for scientific research, similar to those in Antarctica.He spoke proudly about his preparation for the moon landing which made him a household name, as he took the audience through the mission’s final moments using never before seen footage....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 24, 2011
IKEA's billionaire founder Ingvar Kamprad was a member of the Swedish Nazi party and was such a concern to secret service they opened a file on him, according to a new book.
The 1943 file, revealed in a book published on Wednesday by Swedish journalist Elisabeth Åsbrink, will revive the long-standing controversy over the far right sympathies of the 85-year-old businessman.
It proves for the first time that Mr Kamprad was an active member of Svensk Socialistisk Samling – the successor to the Swedish Nationalist Socialist Workers Party – even detailing his membership number, 4013....
