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: Civil War Librarian
August 9, 2011
Maintenance workers at the Gettysburg National Military Park cutting through a fallen oak tree have discovered bullets fired during the famed Civil War battle. The crews came across the bullets earlier this month, while working on Culp's Hill, which served as the right flank of the Union Army on July 1st, 2nd and 3rd in 1863. "Culp’s Hill is one of the areas on the Gettysburg battlefield that saw intense fighting in July 1863," says Park Superintendent Bob Kirby. "One hundred years ago it was commonplace to find bullets in Gettysburg trees but this is a rarity today."Two sections of the tree trunk where the bullets were found have been moved to the park's museum collections storage area. They will be treated to remove insects and mold and then added to the park's artifacts collection. According to the National Park Service, a number of witness trees on the battlefield have been frequently pointed out during battlefield tours.Other previously unknown Witness Trees are often identified during preparatory work for battlefield rehabilitation efforts, where the park re-opens historic meadows and farm fields to restore the historic integrity of the 1863 battlefield and to improve the visitors’ understanding of what happened during the clash between Union and Confederate forces.
Source: BBC News
August 10, 2011
Sweden's royal family has rejected allegations of links between the German-born queen's late father and the Nazi regime in Germany.Queen Silvia has published a report she commissioned in response to claims her father took over a factory from a Jewish businessman.The report concluded that Walter Sommerlath had in fact helped the Jewish man escape from Germany.But a Holocaust survivors' group dimissed the findings as a "whitewash"....
Source: AP
August 9, 2011
TOKYO (AP) — The United States sent a representative for the first time Tuesday to the annual memorial service for victims of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, one of two nuclear attacks that led Japan to surrender in World War II.The U.S. bombing of Nagasaki 66 years ago killed some 80,000 people. Three days earlier, the U.S. had dropped another atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing up to 140,000.U.S. Charge d'Affaires James P. Zumwalt, the first American representative to attend the Nagasaki memorial service, said in a statement that President Barack Obama hoped to work with Japan toward his goal "of realizing a world without nuclear weapons" — a commitment Japan has made repeatedly since the war.Obama last year sent Ambassador John Roos to the 65th anniversary of the bombing in Hiroshima, and Roos visited Nagasaki twice last year on other dates, according to the U.S. Embassy in Japan....
Source: Fox News
August 8, 2011
In 1979, as the U.S. was reeling from skyrocketing interest rates, high unemployment and an energy crisis, President Jimmy Carter delivered a televised address that would later infamously be labeled, “the malaise speech." He never used the word, but rather blamed the poor economy in part on a "crisis of the American spirit."In hindsight, that speech now seems like a hard lesson on the political liabilities of the blame game -- something critics say President Obama has failed to grasp more than 30 years later. Obama has suggested that blame for the stagnant U.S. economy lies in places other than the Oval Office. The latest example occurred Monday, when the president said, "There will always be economic factors that we can't control, earthquakes, spikes in oil prices, slowdowns in other parts of the world.”
Source: AP
August 8, 2011
The F.B.I. says DNA found on the tie of the hijacker D. B. Cooper does not match a new suspect. Special Agent Fred Gutt cautioned that the test did not necessarily rule out the suspect because investigators did not know whether DNA on the tie is that of Cooper’s....
Source: NYT
August 8, 2011
NEWPORT NEWS, Va. — Military secrecy was a bit lax during the Civil War, by today’s standards, but contractor deadlines were a lot tighter.The technology that revolutionized naval warfare began with a five-sentence message delivered to The New York Times 150 years ago, on Aug. 9, 1861, and the information was not exactly classified. It was an advertisement placed by the Union Navy, to appear the following six days, under the heading “Iron-Clad Steam Vessels.”“The Navy Department will receive offers from parties who are able to execute work of this kind,” the ad announced, describing its desire for a two-masted ship “either of iron or of wood and iron combined. The plans had to be submitted by early September, giving designers less than a month.Less than six months later, a shipyard in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, launched not merely an ironclad but an entirely new kind of warship. The U.S.S. Monitor had no masts and no line of cannons. It was essentially a submarine beneath a revolving gun turret, something so tiny and bizarre-looking that many experts doubted the “cheese box on a raft” would float, much less fight....
Source: NYT
August 7, 2011
NAGASAKI, Japan — In 1945, Masahito Hirose saw the white mushroom cloud rise from the atomic bomb that incinerated this city and that left his aunt to die a slow, painful death, bleeding from her nose and gums. Still, like other survivors of the attacks here and in Hiroshima, he quietly accepted Japan’s postwar embrace of nuclear-generated power, believing government assurances that it was both safe and necessary for the nation’s economic rise.That was before this year’s disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in northern Japan confronted the survivors once again with their old nightmare: thousands of civilians exposed to radiation. Aghast at the catastrophic failure of nuclear technology, and outraged by revelations that the government and power industry had planted nuclear proponents at recent town hall-style meetings, the elderly atomic bomb survivors, dwindling in numbers, have begun stepping forward for the first time to oppose nuclear power.
Source: BBC
August 8, 2011
New research has cast doubt on the theory that 97 infants were killed at a Roman brothel in Buckinghamshire.
In 2008, the remains of the newborn babies were rediscovered packed in cigarette cases in a dusty museum storeroom by Dr Jill Eyers from Chiltern Archaeology.
They were excavated from the remains of a lavish Roman villa complex in Buckinghamshire almost 100 years earlier, but had remained hidden ever since.
She has now carefully plotted the infant burials and the associated artefacts from The Yewden Villa at Hambleden.
This revealed that all those infants that could be dated were buried between 150AD and 200AD, meaning all their deaths look like they took place in a 50-year period.
And she said she now had a whole h
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 8, 2011
Hundreds of folders of historical documents chronicling pivotal moments in British history have gone missing from The National Archives.
Among the 1,600 folders of documents reported missing since 2005 are letters from Sir Winston Churchill to General Franco, the Spanish dictator; minutes of Harold Wilson's meetings with the Queen; and documents from the courts of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and Charles I.
Dozens of regimental diaries, medal records and squadron and battleship logbooks have also seemingly disappeared.
Some of the files, many of which contain the sole copies of historical documents, have not been seen since the early 1990s and fewer than a half have been recovered, according to a register of missing items released under freedom of information laws.
Historians have accused the National Archives, which is overseen by the Ministry of Justice, of "administrative laxness"....
Source: BBC
August 8, 2011
In March 1938, a Church of England chaplain set out to save the lives of hundreds of desperate Austrian Jews facing persecution by the Nazis by baptising them as Christians, to help them flee the country.
The controversial work of the Reverend Hugh Grimes - which began the day after Nazi Germany annexed Austria - is little recognised yet it led to what could be called Britain's own "Schindler's list".
It all began with the Anschluss (annexation), when Hitler made Austria part of the Third Reich just before the start of World War II.
The Reverend Hugh Grimes was chaplain of Christ Church in Vienna, a little piece of England in Austria.
Concerned about what he saw happening around him, he came up with a plan.
Before long, the trickle of baptisms at his church - which mainly catered for British embassy staff and other expatriates in the city - turned into a flood.....
Source: BBC
August 7, 2011
From feral child to "human pet" at court in Georgian England, Peter the Wild Boy caused a sensation. And new analysis of his portraits may have solved the mystery of his unusual characteristics.
No-one knows if his name was really Peter - he couldn't talk. Nor did he walk, preferring to scamper on all fours, picking the pockets of courtiers and stealing kisses.
Peter had been found living alone and naked in a German forest in 1725, presumably abandoned by parents who struggled to cope.
There was much fanciful speculation that he had been raised by wolves - or perhaps bears - and this was why he ate with his hands, disliked wearing clothes and could not be taught to speak, says Lucy Worsley, curator of Historic Royal Palaces.
Source: BBC
August 8, 2011
Two former US security contractors may sue former Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for his role in their alleged torture in Iraq, a court has ruled.
US citizens Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel said they were held for months by US troops under harsh conditions.
They said they were detained in retaliation for efforts to reveal illegal activities by their employer.
A federal appeals court on Monday ruled that former Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld had no immunity in the case....
Source: BBC
August 8, 2011
The sole survivor of one of the US Army Black Hawk helicopters shot down by Somali militiamen in Mogadishu in 1993 says the deaths of 18 of his comrades should not have prompted the end of the military mission to restore order.
Pilot Michael Durant told Radio 4's Broadcasting House that today's famine can be traced back to that decision to withdraw.
It was 3 October 1993, and Mr Durant's Black Hawk was taking part in an operation to capture close associates of the local warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid.
Since the fall of Somalia's government in 1991, Mr Aidid had been waging a bloody clan war and hampering United Nations efforts to deliver relief supplies to a civilian population facing starvation....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
August 8, 2011
The excavation of an ancient drainage tunnel beneath Jerusalem has yielded a sword, oil lamps, pots and coins abandoned during a war here 2,000 years ago, according to archaeologists.
The tunnel was built two millennia ago underneath one of Roman-era Jerusalem's main streets, which today largely lies under an Arab neighbourhood in the city's eastern sector.
After a four-year excavation, the tunnel is part of a growing network of subterranean passages under the politically combustible modern city.
The tunnel was intended to drain rainwater, but is also thought to have been used as a hiding place for the rebels during the time of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.....
Source: AP
August 8, 2011
Nine former soldiers and officials have turned themselves over to a court in El Salvador after being indicted in Spain in the 1989 killings of six Jesuit priests and two other people during the Central American country's civil war.
The Defense Department said Monday the nine soldiers turned themselves in at a military base and were handed over to a Salvadoran court.
A tenth suspect in the Spanish case has since died, and 10 other suspects have not been located....
Source: Fox News
August 8, 2011
In 1979, as the U.S. was reeling from skyrocketing interest rates, high unemployment and an energy crisis, President Jimmy Carter delivered a televised address that would later infamously be labeled, “the malaise speech." He never used the word, but rather blamed the poor economy in part on a "crisis of the American spirit."
In hindsight, that speech now seems like a hard lesson on the political liabilities of the blame game -- something critics say President Obama has failed to grasp more than 30 years later.
This tactic from the Obama administration is not new. Five days ago, the president suggested "messy democracy” bore some blame for economic stagnation.
Source: Fox News
August 6, 2011
Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis believed Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was behind the assassination of her husband, according to tapes recorded by the former first lady just months after President John F. Kennedy's death, the Daily Mail reports.The tapes, which are set to be released by ABC News, reportedly reveal that Kennedy-Onassis believed then-vice president Johnson, along with businessmen in the South, planned the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of her husband in Dallas, Texas.The tabloid reports about the content of the tapes are totally erroneous," an ABC News spokesperson said in a statement to FoxNews.com....
Source: AP
August 6, 2011
There are girls with ribbons in their hair, boys in short pants or wool jackets (one even wears a discarded Hitler Youth uniform). There are teens and toddlers. There are kids who look happy, sad, scared, tense and relieved — greatly relieved.There are few hints in the photos, aside from some weary eyes or bony arms, of the hardships they endured to get to this moment: hiding in strangers' homes, stealing scraps of bread to survive, gasping for air in cramped cattle cars.These are children who'd come through the fire, survivors of the Holocaust photographed by social service agencies across Europe soon after World War II. There are more than 1,100 pictures, long stashed away and forgotten in the mists of history.Until now.More than 65 years later, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is reaching out around the world to find the people in these extraordinary photos. It has posted the pictures online and spread the word that the search is on....
Source: Huffington Post
August 7, 2011
WASHINGTON -- Nearly a year after two alpha males on Capitol Hill slew a bill to allow a National Women's History Museum here, the head of the nascent project has quietly taken steps to placate conservative critics.A former executive director of the Eagle Forum, which led the fight to defeat an Equal Rights Amendment for women, is among several conservative women who have been added to the museum's board...."We have an obligation to represent a wide range of voices, to be inclusive," Joan Wages, NWHM's president, told The Huffington Post in an interview. "We're hoping we took steps to address their issues."Wages was referring to Republican Sens. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Jim DeMint of South Carolina. The two men slapped a hold on a bill that would have allowed the museum to use private funds to buy an oddly shaped lot off Independence Avenue -- straddling a busy expressway leading under the National Mall. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the sale would have generated up to $60 million for the federal government....
Source: NYT
August 8, 2011
HAVANA — The hair and accents were wrong, but the audience cared about just one thing: the house band was singing the Beatles, here, in a new bar called the Yellow Submarine, in Cuba, where such an act might have led to arrests in the mid-1960s.Better yet, perhaps because of that history, the band played like rebels. Fast and raw, they zipped up and down the bass lines of “Dear Prudence” as if the song were new. They raced through “Rocky Raccoon,” and when they reached the opening words of “Let It Be” — “When I find myself in times of trouble” — the entire crowd began singing along, swaying, staring at the band or belting out the chorus with their eyes closed in rapture.“If there’s no Beatles, there’s no rock ’n’ roll,” said Guille Vilar, a co-creator of the bar. “This is music created with authenticity.”
