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: CNN
July 12, 2011
Current and past first ladies and two former presidents will attend a Tuesday memorial service in California for former first lady Betty Ford.The White House announced that Michelle Obama would travel to Palm Desert, California, for the National Tribute Service.Former first lady Rosalynn Carter will be one of the eulogists, Ford family spokesman Gregory Willard said over the weekend. Journalist Cokie Roberts will join Carter in paying tribute to Ford.Hillary Clinton, the current secretary of state, will be accompanied Tuesday by her husband, former President Bill Clinton, an aide told CNN. Nancy Reagan also will attend the service, starting at 2 p.m. (5 p.m. ET) at St. Margaret's Episcopal Church in Palm Desert, a Reagan Foundation official said....
Source: BBC News
July 11, 2011
A lost painting by Renaissance artist Michelangelo has been hanging in a University of Oxford residence, an Italian scholar claims.The Campion Hall painting, which depicts the crucifixion, had been thought to be by Marcello Venusti.But Antonio Forcellino said infra-red technology had revealed the true creator of the masterpiece.It has been removed from a wall of the Jesuit academic community and sent to the Ashmolean Museum for safekeeping.'Excitement and concern'The master of Campion Hall, Father Brendan Callaghan, said: "It's a very beautiful piece, but far too valuable to have on our wall any more."...
Source: BBC News
July 12, 2011
A senior Israeli rabbi has ruled that a group of residents of the Spanish island of Mallorca are of Jewish descent, reports say.The Chuetas, of Palma de Mallorca, descended from Jewish inhabitants on the island who were forced to convert to Christianity 600 years ago.Many can trace their heritage back to ancestors killed during the 17th Century for practicing Judaism.A rabbi was sent to the island to look at community members' family trees.It was found that the group of 20,000 people had remained close-knit. Many have one of 15 distinct Chueta family names.
Source: BBC News
July 12, 2011
A campaign group has said the US president should order a criminal investigation into alleged torture sanctioned by the Bush administration.Human Rights Watch (HRW) says there is "overwhelming evidence" of torture ordered by George W Bush.The former president has defended some of the techniques, saying they prevented attacks and saved lives.The Obama administration has launched inquiries into deaths in CIA custody and other "unauthorised actions".But HRW argues these inquiries will not cover the activities which were specifically authorised as legal by officials within the Bush administration.The former president, vice-president, defence secretary and head of the CIA should all be investigated, the group says....
Source: NYT
July 9, 2011
It was two weeks before the liftoff of the Apollo 11 mission when Thomas Moser’s boss walked into his office at NASA and announced, “We’re putting a flag on the moon.”Mr. Moser, then a 30-year-old mechanical engineer, was put in charge of designing a flag mechanism that could not only fit into the lunar module and survive the flight, but also make the flag appear to fly on the windless moon.His solution involved two sections of a staff, a telescoping tube and a nylon flag bought at a local housing goods store (Sears, he thinks). But in order for the flag to fit the staff, its edges needed to be trimmed. “They were throwing it all in the trash,” Mr. Moser recalled of the remnants in a recent interview, “so I picked it up out of the trash can, mounted it and had Neil Armstrong sign it.”Forty-two years later, Mr. Moser is auctioning off those flag remnants. The expected selling price: $100,000....
Source: NYT
July 8, 2011
PHILADELPHIA — Who owns 10 exceedingly rare American gold coins from 1933?Is it the family of a local gold dealer who died 21 years ago? Or is it the United States government, which produced a half million of the coins before melting all of them — well, almost all of them — down?Family members, who say they found the coins in a safe deposit box in 2003, argue they are the rightful owners of the exquisite “double eagle” $20 coins, each now worth millions of dollars. The government argues that the coins, never officially released, belong to the United States, and not the heirs of Israel Switt, the gold dealer.And so to court....
Source: Forbes
May 26, 2011
Since the day of Alexander Hamilton, the United States has never defaulted on the federal debt.That’s what we budget-watchers always say. It’s a great talking point. One that helps bolster the argument that default should not be an option in Washington’s ongoing debt limit slowdown.There’s just one teensy problem: it isn’t true. As Jason Zweig of the Wall Street Journal recently noted, the United States defaulted on some Treasury bills in 1979. And it paid a steep price for stiffing bondholders.Terry Zivney and Richard Marcus describe the default in The Financial Review (sorry, I can’t find an ungated version):
Source: WaPo
July 10, 2011
The Sunday airwaves brimmed once again with talk of what would – or would not – happen if lawmakers fail to meet the Aug. 2 deadline to raise the nation’s legal limit on borrowing. Unmentioned by either side was an obscure bit of budgetary history in which the country did default on some of its bills, and wound up paying the consequences.Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that inaction “would be catastrophic for the economy” and added that “no responsible leader would say the United States of America, for the first time in its history, should not pay its bills, meet its obligations.”...In fact, there was one short-lived incident in the spring of 1979 that offers a glimpse of some of the problems and costs that might arise if the stalemate on Capitol Hill continues. Then, as now, Congress had been playing a game of chicken with the debt limit, raising it to $830 billion – compared with today’s $14.3 trillion – only after Treasury Secretary W. Michael Blumenthal warned that the country was hours away from the first default in its history....
Source: NYT
July 10, 2011
WINSLOW, Ariz. — Alfred Moya was stopping at a restaurant in rural Gallup, N.M., on his way home to Phoenix in the summer of 2007 when he happened to glance at a newspaper article about children who had been sexually abused by a priest.Suddenly, his thoughts flashed to his own days as an altar boy in nearby Holbrook, Ariz., and the town’s charismatic priest, the Rev. Clement A. Hageman. “And then I started remembering,” he would later recount, according to court documents.Over the past few years, a growing number of predominantly Hispanic men from the string of dusty towns along Route 66 in Arizona have stepped forward, alleging that Father Hageman sexually abused them as boys when he worked in local parishes from the early 1940s until his death in 1975.
Source: NYT
July 10, 2011
The question was, have you ever taken a murderer across the Hudson?“Not that I know of,” said Capt. Tim Byam, at the wheel of a New York Waterway ferry bound for Weehawken, N.J.At that, the man in the blue blazer standing behind Captain Byam piped up: “He was a killer, but was he a murderer? The other guy had a gun, too.”It was not a non sequitur. The “he” was Aaron Burr, the vice president under Thomas Jefferson. The “other guy” was Alexander Hamilton, the former secretary of the treasury.And the man in the blazer the other morning was David O. Stewart, a lawyer-turned-historian who was retracing Burr’s trip to Weehawken, a trip Mr. Stewart said Burr never should have taken. It led to the infamous duel that left Hamilton dying — and Burr’s reputation in tatters....
Source: NYT
July 11, 2011
COLQUITT, Ga. — The heat and the drought are so bad in this southwest corner of Georgia that hogs can barely eat. Corn, a lucrative crop with a notorious thirst, is burning up in fields. Cotton plants are too weak to punch through soil so dry it might as well be pavement.Farmers with the money and equipment to irrigate are running wells dry in the unseasonably early and particularly brutal national drought that some say could rival the Dust Bowl days....Climatologists say the great drought of 2011 is starting to look a lot like the one that hit the nation in the early to mid-1950s. That, too, dried a broad swath of the southern tier of states into leather and remains a record breaker....“In the ’30s, you had the Depression and everything that happened with that, and drought on top,” said Donald A. Wilhite, director of the school of natural resources at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and former director of the National Drought Mitigation Center. “The combination of those two things was devastating.”...
Source: Politico
July 8, 2011
DETROIT - Presidents past and current paid tribute to former first lady Betty Ford, who died Friday at age 93.Ford’s battles with cancer and substance abuse inspired millions to seek treatment. Betty Ford’s husband, Former President Gerald Ford, died in December 2006.The couple married in 1948, the same year he was elected to Congress. She was thrust into the spotlight in 1974 when he became president after the resignation of President Richard Nixon. She was diagnosed with breast cancer weeks later and won acclaim for her openness and courage....
Source: NYT
July 8, 2011
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — There was a time, some of us remember, when a countdown at Canaveral stopped the world in its tracks. On television or at the launching, every breath was held at liftoff and every eye followed the fiery plume of ascent, up and away. Godspeed, said someone who was everyone....“We’ve come full circle since 1961, back to when we had yet to show we could launch people into space,” said Steven J. Dick, a retired NASA chief historian. “We will be hitching rides from the Russians to go to the space station that is mainly ours.”The irony of having to send our astronauts up in Russian Soyuz capsules is as plain as cold war history. The Soviet Union’s early dominance of space, manifested by the Sputnik surprise in 1957 and subsequent feats, prompted the United States to match and then surpass the Soviets in a program topped off by the Apollo 11 lunar landing in 1969. Human spaceflight would have come along anyway, but not with quite the urgency of the Soviet-American competition....
Source: BBC
July 8, 2011
Adolf Hitler's hometown in Austria has revoked the Nazi leader's honorary citizenship - even if he never may have been given it.
The council in Braunau am Inn decided to strip Hitler of any honour he may have received and which did not expire automatically after his death in 1945.
Hitler was actually born in Ranshofen in 1889, and the village made him an honorary citizen in 1933.
Ranshofen later became part of Braunau, and is now seen as Hitler's birthplace....
Source: BBC
July 7, 2011
A hugely valuable illuminated manuscript has disappeared from the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, say police.
The Codex Calixtinus dates from the 12th Century and was compiled as a guidebook for medieval pilgrims following the Way of Saint James.
This is the oldest copy of the manuscript and is unsaleable on the open market.
Only a handful of people had access to the room in which it was kept.
This edition of the Codex Calixtinus is thought to date from around 1150.
Its purpose was largely practical - to collect advice of use to pilgrims heading to the shrine there. It also included sermons and homilies to St James....
Source: BBC
July 8, 2011
A French couple have found a hoard of gold coins worth at least 100,000 euros (£89,000; $140,000) in the cellar of their home in the town of Millau.
They were working on their drains when they dug up the 34 coins in a little clay pot, French media said.
The coins date from 1595 to the French Revolution, which began in 1789, said a local coin expert who evaluated them.
The most valuable is a double louis from 1640, during the reign of Louis XIII, worth 6,500 euros.
Source: BBC
July 5, 2011
Scientists in Australia have found the skeleton of a "giant wombat" which lived some two million years ago.
The plant-eating marsupial would have been the size of a four-wheel drive car and weighed three tonnes, experts say.
Its bones were found on a farm in north-eastern Australia's Queensland state.
It is the first time a complete skeleton of a Diprotodon optatum has been uncovered.
The animal was widespread across Australia about 50,000 years ago, when it is believed the first indigenous people lived....
Source: BBC
July 8, 2011
Former Chadian President Hissene Habre is to be sent home from Senegal to face accusations that he committed atrocities during his eight-year rule.
Senegal said Mr Habre would be flown to Chad on 11 July.
Mr Habre is blamed for killing and torturing tens of thousands of opponents between 1982 and 1990, charges he denies.
Mr Habre - sometimes dubbed "Africa's Pinochet" - has been living in Dakar since he was ousted....
Source: BBC
July 8, 2011
A skull belonging to one of the largest "sea monsters" ever unearthed is being unveiled to the public.
The beast, which is called a pliosaur, has been described as the most fearsome predator the Earth has seen.
The fossil was found in Dorset, but it has taken 18 months to remove the skull from its rocky casing, revealing the monster in remarkable detail.
Scientists suspect the creature, which is on show at the Dorset County Museum, may be a new species or even genus.....
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Source: BBC
July 7, 2011
US police have recovered a Picasso drawing, two days after it was stolen from a San Francisco art gallery.
The drawing, valued at $275,000 (£172,000), was taken from the Weinstein gallery by a man wearing dark glasses. He was filmed by security cameras leaving the scene in a taxi.
A suspect, named as Mark Lugo, 30, has been taken into custody.
He was arrested at a hotel in Napa, California, where the artwork was found, police said.
He faces several charges, including theft and possession of stolen property....
