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: AP
Aug 22, 2013
WASHINGTON (AP) — It's a good thing Richard Nixon was such a klutz.The president's ineptness at all things mechanical is what prompted his aides to install a voice-activated recording system that didn't require Nixon to push an on-off button, ensuring that every word he spoke in the Oval Office and other key locations was caught on tape.With the secret taping system on autopilot — seven microphones planted in wall sconces and the president's desk — Nixon largely forgot about it, and let loose with the raw, gossipy, conniving and too-clever words that ultimately toppled his presidency and forever changed the way Americans think about their presidents and their government.The tapes — the last installment of them released Wednesday — are like the black box in an increasingly out-of-control airplane, recording right up to the crash.In the tapes, Americans began to see their presidents as "less glorious, less heroic, less romantic — either more like us, or more like people we don't like," says presidential historian Julian Zelizer of Princeton University....
Source: The Conversation
Aug 21, 2013
The North Atlantic islands were populated five hundred years earlier than previously thought.
Source: BBC News
Aug 21, 2013
Researchers found evidence for garlic mustard in the residues left on
ancient pottery shards discovered in what is now Denmark and Germany.
Source: LA Times
Aug 21, 2013
The earliest known iron beads may come from ancient Egyptian tombs,
but they were forged from the hearts of meteorites, scientists say.
Source: LA Times
Aug 21, 2013
The budget ax has fallen on a CIA office that focused on declassifying historical materials, a move scholars say will mean fewer public disclosures about long-buried intelligence secrets and scandals.The Historical Collections Division, which has declassified documents on top Soviet spies, a secret CIA airline in the Vietnam War, the Cuban missile crisis and other major operations, has been disbanded. The office that handles Freedom of Information Act requests will take over the work.
Source: NYT
Aug 21, 2013
An outside review of Bloomberg L.P.’s practices found that a controversial article that compared the damage in an Italian town after a bad deal with JPMorgan Chase to the fallout from the Nazis’ occupation in World War II went “too far.”The 2011 article, which JPMorgan complained about at the time and Bloomberg declined to change, has long been a sore spot between the bank and Bloomberg and was recently mentioned in a New York Times article that focused on the friction between Wall Street and Bloomberg.“In one of the great campaigns of World War II, Monte Cassino was completely destroyed in a wave of battles that claimed 75,000 casualties and the lives of hundreds of townspeople. To suggest that a bond deal gone sour, curtailing daycare for 60 children and services for the poor, is comparable to the terror and cataclysm of war is inconsistent with BN’s high standards,” Clark Hoyt, an editor-at-large at Bloomberg News and a former public editor of The Times, found in his review, which focused on the relationship between Bloomberg’s news and commercial operations....
Source: Nixon Library
Aug 21, 2013
On August 21, 2013, the Nixon Library opened the final installment of 94 White House Tapes, as well as formerly restricted and unprocessed textual materials.White House TapesThe final installment of 94 tapes cover the period from April 9 – July 12, 1973, and cover discussions of foreign policy issues including: implementation of the Vietnam peace settlement and the return of Prisoners of War (POWs); tensions over Most Favored Nation tariff status for the Soviet Union; and the history 1972 “Soviet Summit” between the United States and the U.S.S.R. Domestic conversations include Presidential appointments and personnel management, energy policy, wage and price controls, campaign finance reform, Wounded Knee, and Watergate.Listen to the newly released tapesListen to sample foreign policy clips on the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum's YouTube Channel
Source: NYT
Aug 21, 2013
How to get a kid jazzed about the oldest stories in the world in an age of distraction? Make a game of it. That’s the idea behind History Hero, a new app for portable Apple devices that asks children to defend history – for video-game-style points — against an alien group known as the Erasers.Using portable devices, players seek to “save” world culture from an alien breed bent on social obliteration by answering questions or snapping pictures of artifacts.The app combines newfangled gaming rewards with old-fashioned scavenger hunts in institutions like London’s British Museum to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art....
Source: The Local (Sweden)
Aug 20, 2013
The rare instrument was stolen from a Swedish museum ten years ago.
Source: The Guardian
Aug 20, 2013
An elaborately carved rudder that has sat on the seabed of the
English Channel for more than 400 years has been raised by
archaeologists.
Source: State Department
Aug 20, 2013
The Department of State released today Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XXXIII, SALT II, 1972–1980.This volume is part of a Foreign Relations subseries that documents the most important foreign policy issues of the Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford presidential administrations. Because of the long-term nature of the SALT II negotiations, however, this volume also includes the period of the Jimmy Carter administration, as Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter worked to resolve the complex, evolving, and interrelated issues necessary to reach an agreement. All three presidents sought to go beyond the Interim Agreement signed at the Moscow Summit in May 1972 through the achievement of a formal treaty on strategic arms. The negotiations were a central component of foreign policy for all three administrations, demanding sustained attention at the highest level of government. This volume offers a rare direct comparison of bureaucratic processes and leadership styles as well as the personal and institutional interplay across these administrations.
Source: NYT
Aug 20, 2013
In a life that was relatively brief but exceedingly active, George Orwell was, among other things, a police officer in Burma, a dishwasher in France, a tramp in England, a combatant in Spain, a war correspondent in Germany and a farmer in the Hebrides. Like many people of his era — he was born in 1903 and died in 1950 — he was also a prolific letter writer, and a particularly captivating and thoughtful one at that, thanks partly to the wealth of experience he had acquired.“George Orwell: A Life in Letters” is a judiciously chosen selection of some of the most interesting of these casual writings, from a 20-year period that included both the Great Depression and World War II. Peter Davison, who selected and annotated the letters, was also the lead editor of Orwell’s 20-volume “Complete Works” and has sought here to distill Orwell’s essence, as man and thinker, into a more manageable size and format.
Source: NYT
Aug 20, 2013
Granted that Rome was not built in a day, the unresolved question among scholars has been just how long did it take. How early, before Julius Caesar came, saw and conquered, did Romans begin adopting a monumental architecture reflecting the grandeur of their ambitions?Most historians agree that early Rome had nothing to compare to the sublime temples of Greece and was not a particularly splendid city, like Alexandria in Egypt.Any definitive insight into the formative stages of Roman architectural hubris lies irretrievable beneath layers of the city’s repeated renovations through the time of caesars, popes and the Renaissance. The most imposing ruin of the early Roman imperial period is the Colosseum, erected in the first century A.D.
Source: NYT
Aug 20, 2013
Four years ago, the American Museum of Natural History agreed to return to the Apaches 77 objects from its collection, including headwear, feathers, bows and arrows, medicine rings and satchels containing crystals and charms.But none of the items have gone back because of an unusual, if persistent, disagreement with representatives of the Apaches over whether the museum will officially designate the items as sacred relics that should never have been taken.At first glance, the dispute would seem to hinge on semantics: the museum is prepared to refer to the objects, many more than a century old, as “cultural items,” while the Apaches insist that they be designated as “sacred” and “items of cultural patrimony,” legal classifications set out under federal law. The Apaches say this is hardly a case of being fussy. They say the items are imbued with their religion’s holy beings, that tribal elders attribute problems like alcoholism and unemployment on reservations to their unsettled spirits, and that the museum’s position is insulting to them and their deities....
Source: Detroit Free Press
Aug 20, 2013
Less than seven weeks from now, Oct. 7 will mark the 100th anniversary of the moving automobile assembly line at the historic Highland Park complex, where Henry Ford first paid workers $5 a day to build Model T cars.But as with far too much of metro Detroit’s automotive heritage, the Ford Highland Park property has sat largely dormant and ignored for decades, sorely in need of restoration and renovation so it can be properly celebrated as a shrine of American ingenuity.Today, the Woodward Avenue Action Association (WA3) is launching an online crowd funding campaign, dubbed Five Dollars a Day, hoping to raise the final $125,000 needed to buy two historic structures on the site, the four-story Administration Building which fronts Woodward, and an adjacent 8,000-square-foot executive garage....
Source: AP
Aug 20, 2013
...The scenes are as riveting as any Hollywood war movie. But they are snippets of historical footage from the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, enhanced by modern coloring and sound techniques — and turned into a film.The only purely fictional elements are voiceovers presenting an imagined narrative that stitches together the footage: Two brothers scour the streets of the Polish city tasked with filming the 1944 rebellion of Warsaw residents against their Nazi occupiers, commenting on what they witness, from soup kitchens to scenes of destruction.It makes for a mesmerizing account of the fierce house-to-house fighting against the German army that began on Aug. 1 and ended 63 days later with the insurgents surrendering, following the deaths of some 200,000 rebels and residents. “Warsaw Rising” is cobbled together from black-and-white silent footage of crews that the Polish resistance Home Army sent fanning through the city to chronicle the uprising. Cinematographers hired by the Warsaw Rising Museum added coloration and sound that give a real-life feel, while modern editing techniques provide a polished, fast-paced narrative....
Source: CBS News
Aug 20, 2013
August 20, 2013 12:15 PM EDT — For the first time, the CIA is acknowledging that it organized the overthrow of Iran's government in 1953. (CBS News) [CLICK LINK FOR VIDEO]
Source: NYT
Aug 19, 2013
LOS ANGELES — It was known as the Temple of the Stars: a soaring sanctuary capped by a 100-foot-wide Byzantine dome, built by Hollywood moguls on the eve of the Depression and splashed with the kind of pizazz one might expect at a movie palace rather than a synagogue.But over the last 80 years, the Wilshire Boulevard Temple has become a monument to neglect, its handsome murals cracked, the gold-painted dome blackened by soot, the sanctuary dark and grim. A foot-long chunk of plaster crashed to the ground one night.The congregation, too, has faded; while still vibrant and active, it has grown older, showing no signs of growth. This once proud symbol of religious life in Los Angeles seemed on the brink of becoming a victim of the steady ethnic churn of the city, as its neighborhood grew increasingly Korean and Hispanic and Jews moved to the west side.
Source: AP
Aug 19, 2013
An Austrian collector has found what may be the oldest globe, dated 1504, to depict the New World, engraved with immaculate detail on two conjoined halves of ostrich eggs.The globe, about the size of a grapefruit, is labeled in Latin and includes what were considered exotic territories such as Japan, Brazil and Arabia. North America is depicted as a group of scattered islands. The globe’s lone sentence, above the coast of Southeast Asia, is “Hic Sunt Dracones.”“ ‘Here be dragons,’ a very interesting sentence,” said Thomas Sander, editor of the Portolan, the journal of the Washington Map Society. The journal published a comprehensive analysis of the globe Monday by collector Stefaan Missinne. “In early maps, you would see images of sea monsters; it was a way to say there’s bad stuff out there.”...
Source: The Art Newspaper
Aug 19, 2013
Emergency restoration work started today on a section of Florence’s famous Vasari Corridor, after some plaster and tiles fell from the roof on Friday. The damage occurred in the section of the raised corridor that passes next to the church of Santa Felicita, just over the Ponte Vecchio, on the south side of the river Arno.It is reported that no one was hurt, and museum professionals are already establishing the best course of action to restore the damage to the building. Around ten portraits have been removed from the walls as a precaution while restoration work begins, but the popular tourist site will remain open.Coincidentally, the same portion of the corridor was due to be closed most of next month while curators install a series of self-portraits of 20th-century and contemporary artists for an exhibition that is scheduled to open at the end of September....
