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: Telegraph (UK)
August 12, 2011
Nearly two dozen singers and musicians from nine Latin American nations gathered to honour Fidel Castro with a happy-birthday concert on Friday on the eve of the former leader's 85th birthday.
Dubbed the "Serenade to Fidelity," the spectacle was planned as a "homage to the life of a man, of a people, of a nation and of a revolution," the Communist Party newspaper Granma said.
Dignitaries from other countries were expected and the event's planner promised there would be surprise visitors, but it was not known whether Castro himself would attend.
Castro has been a prolific writer of newspaper columns and books in recent years, including autobiographical accounts of the events that led him to take power in a 1959 revolution.
Castro has published just one opinion column since late May, though it's not unusual or unprecedented for his pen to go silent for extended periods....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 15, 2011
A Rembrandt drawing valued at more than $250,000 (£152,000) was stolen from a hotel during what police called a well planned heist.
The pen and ink drawing called "The Judgment" was on display as part of an exhibition in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Los Angeles.
Police believe the thief had accomplices and had worked out a detailed strategy for stealing the 11in by 6in work.
The hotel was hosting a private exhibition which was offering artworks for sale to possible buyers.
A curator was distracted by another person during which time the thief snatched the drawing from the wall and escaped undetected....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 15, 2011
Canada's Conservative government, stressing traditional ties to the Queen and the monarchy, is reinstating the names Royal Canadian Air Force and Royal Canadian Navy after a gap of 43 years.
The Liberals removed the "royal" designation in 1968 when they amalgamated the branches of service and called the military the Canadian Forces.
General Walter Natynczyk, chief of the defence staff, announced the decision to bring back the word "royal" for the official names of the two branches of the military in a memo posted on Monday on the military discussion site Milnet.ca.
The initiative to restore the names of Canada's former services "is aimed at restoring an important and recognisable part of Canada's military heritage," Gen Natynczyk said....
Source: Fox News
August 15, 2011
The House Homeland Security Committee “has initiated an investigation” into the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and whether he was an overlooked key player in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a letter from the committee chairman to Attorney General Eric Holder says.
The three-page letter, obtained exclusively by Fox News, makes the case that a decade after the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, the full story of 9/11 has not been told.
The letter to Holder, sent by Republican Rep.
Source: Slate
August 15, 2011
Two experts on the life of Butch Cassidy say new evidence points to a surprising possibility: the famous Old West outlaw allegedly killed in a Bolivia shootout may have survived quietly into old age, the Associated Press reports.
Source: NYT
August 13, 2011
Nancy Wake did not like killing people. But in wartime, she once told an interviewer, “I don’t see why we women should just wave our men a proud goodbye and then knit them balaclavas.”Ms. Wake, a onetime freelance journalist whose life careered along a path that Hemingway might have sketched, from impoverished childhood to high-society hostess in the south of France to decorated heroine of the French Resistance during World War II, died last Sunday in London. She was 98.In the war, she was credited with saving the lives of hundreds of Allied soldiers and downed airmen between 1940 and 1943 by escorting them through occupied France to safety in Spain.
Source: NYT
August 11, 2011
...Two years ago, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the wall was celebrated by the German government with guests from all over Europe. A ceremonial toppling of giant dominoes was meant to represent the fall of Communism across Eastern Europe.This is a darker moment to recall, the morning of Aug. 13, 1961, when Berliners awoke to find that soldiers had erected barbed-wire barricades, closed down road traffic and sealed off rail links between East Berlin and West Berlin. To this day, the memory dredges up unresolved issues. Germans have never quite come to terms with the building of a wall that sundered their city for 28 years, forging a border where Germans shot Germans for trying to travel across town.The degree of ambivalence about the fall of Communism and the end of the East German state was evident in a survey published by the daily newspaper Berliner Zeitung, in which a third of Berliners thought that the building of the wall was either justified or partly justified to stem the tide of refugees leaving for the West....
Source: BBC
August 11, 2011
Indian President Pratibha Patil has rejected mercy pleas from three Tamils convicted of the 1991 assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.In theory, the ruling paves the way for their execution, officials say.However, there are a growing number of people on death row who have exhausted all legal appeals but whose sentences have not been carried out.Correspondents say bureaucratic delays and a shortage of hangmen have contributed to the backlog....
Source: BBC
August 10, 2011
Germany and Montenegro have signed an agreement on burying the remains of German soldiers killed during World War II.The agreement was reached during a visit to the Balkan state by the German Foreign Minister, Guido Westerwelle.A site containing more than 400 bodies was excavated in Montenegro's capital Podgorica in 2007.The agreement means a new German cemetery will be built in Montenegro to house the remains....
Source: BBC
August 10, 2011
An enormous jawbone found in Kazakhstan is further evidence that giant birds roamed - or flew above - the Earth at the same time as the dinosaurs.Writing in Biology Letters, researchers say the new species, Samrukia nessovi, had a skull some 30cm long.If flightless, the bird would have been 2-3m tall; if it flew, it may have had a wingspan of 4m.The find is only the second bird of such a size in the Cretaceous geologic period, and the first in Asia.The only other evidence of a bird of such a size during the period was a fossilised spinal bone found in France and reported in a 1995 paper in Nature....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 11, 2011
Vladimir Putin, Russia's prime minister has added underwater archaeology to his long list of outdoor pursuits, diving beneath the Black Sea to explore the submerged ruins of an ancient Greek city known as Russia's Atlantis. In a carefully co-ordinated publicity stunt designed to show the 58-year-old Russian prime minister as a dynamic figure interested in his country's heritage, Mr Putin went diving off the Taman Peninsula in southern Russia on Wednesday afternoon.The area was the site of an ancient Greek settlement known as Phanagoria that is currently being excavated by Russian archaeologists, and Mr Putin's scuba diving foray into its submerged ruins received top billing on Russian state TV....
Source: AP
August 12, 2011
Bob Howe points to an overgrown, muddy patch of land in a cemetery in Owensboro, gesturing to where the grave of the last man publicly executed in the United States may be.
The grave is anonymous and unmarked, like other places associated with Rainey Bethea's hanging on Aug. 14, 1936. As the 75th anniversary of the execution approaches, it is something some in Owensboro would like history to remember differently.
Bethea, a farmhand and sometime criminal, went to the gallows near the banks of the Ohio River before a throng of people estimated at as many as 20,000 strong. The execution drew national media coverage focused on a black man being executed by a white, female sheriff with the help of a professional hangman....
Source: CNN
August 11, 2011
Vice City. San Andreas. Liberty City. Tehran.Three of these locales are instantly familiar to videogame diehards as settings in the "Grand Theft Auto" series, which has sold more than 100 million copies worldwide. The latter, however, is more commonly linked to news bulletins about the Iranian nuclear program or confrontational statements by the country's hardline Islamist president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.If Navid Khonsari, 41, has his way, Iran's capital city will soon be much more familiar to gamers. A director of the "Grand Theft Auto" series, the Iranian-born Khonsari's next game has a simple working title whose numerals denote a world of significance: "1979." And the game's tagline? "There are no good guys."
Source: WSJ
August 4, 2011
Few companies in corporate America have as complicated a history as Kraft Foods, the owner of Oreo cookies, Ritz crackers and Oscar Mayer lunch meats. Today, Kraft announced plans to split up, marking yet another shimmy in its background as a mélange of corporations, including Philip Morris, General Foods and RJR Nabisco.Here is an annotated guide for how Kraft came to be:1903: James L. Kraft begins selling cheese from a horse-drawn wagon in Chicago. By 1914, his company begins manufacturing cheese on its own. Over the ensuing decades, Kraft starts or acquires brands including Vegemite, Philadelphia cream cheese, Tombstone pizza and Kraft macaroni and cheese.
Source: Boston Globe
August 5, 2011
BALTIMORE—A presidential historian charged with conspiring to steal valuable documents from archives throughout the Northeast will be allowed to return to his New York City apartment, after a federal judge in Maryland denied prosecutors appeal of his release Friday.Prosecutors argued that Barry Landau, who could be released as soon as Monday, poses a flight risk and could destroy more documents the government has not yet found.Landau and his assistant, 24-year-old Jason Savedoff, are charged with stealing valuable historical documents from the Maryland Historical Society and conspiring to steal documents from other archives. Landau pleaded not guilty Thursday. Savedoff was released on bail last week and has yet to enter a plea....
Source: LA Times
August 7, 2011
Martin Luther King Jr., she admits, looked a little funny at first.His head was too big, his cheekbones were too low, his eyes were kind of lopsided. And his lower lip? "Let's not even go there," Karen Collins, 60, said with a laugh....Her pint-size creations fill nearly every inch of her living room in Compton. On her carpet slaves in chains await their transatlantic voyage. On her fireplace mantel, protesters gather for the Montgomery bus boycott. And on her entertainment center, Malcolm X preaches to the Nation of Islam.She calls it the African American Miniature Museum, and it took her nearly 15 years to build. Soon, she will have a permanent display place at Leimert Park Village....
Source: National Geographic
August 8, 2011
A hundred years ago in Peru, a tall history professor from Yale University left his camp in a valley northwest of Cusco, and walked through cloud forest to a mountain ridge more than 7,500 feet above sea level. There, high above the roaring Urubamba river, he found an ancient stone citadel; sculpted terraces of temples and tombs, granite buildings and polished walls that were covered in centuries of vines and vegetation.Hiram Bingham had stumbled across the Inca site of Machu Picchu, the site he believed to be the ‘Lost city of the Incas’. ‘Machu Picchu might prove to be the largest and most important ruin discovered in South America since the days of the Spanish conquest,’ he wrote in the 1913 edition of the National Geographic.
Source: WaPo
August 8, 2011
The Dow Jones industrial average is one of several market indexes created by Dow Jones Co. co-founder Charles Dow (pictured). It is named after Dow and statistician Edward Jones and includes the stocks of 30 large U.S. companies....The Dow was originally set up to gauge the well-being of the industrial sector, but these days few of the 30 component stocks have to do with heavy industry. When the Dow was created in 1896, it contained only 12 stocks....
Source: DNA India
August 9, 2011
His journeys across mountain ranges and deserts opened the eyes of medieval Europe to the exotic wonders of China and the Silk Road, establishing him as one of history's greatest explorers.But a team of archaeologists believe Marco Polo never even reached the Middle Kingdom, much less introduced pasta to Italy after bringing it back from his travels, as legend has it.Instead they think it more likely that the Venetian merchant adventurer picked up second-hand stories of China, Japan and the Mongol Empire from Persian merchants he met on the shores of the Black Sea, thousands of miles short of the Orient....
Source: Chicago Tribune
August 10, 2011
For decades, Howard Bergman has clung to the "absolutely atrocious" memories of his boyhood in Poland, when his family was herded into Nazi labor camps and his father and brother were murdered.Susan Nesher and her sisters had spent years wondering about a mystery from their father's past: the family they'd heard he lost in the Holocaust before he married their mother, a part of his history he would not discuss.In recent months, Bergman, 83, of Skokie, has learned details about his father's death that had eluded him for more than 65 years. Nesher, 56, of Highland Park, has been able to fill in some of the blank pages in her family's history, including the names of her two half-siblings.
