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: NY Post
Jul 5, 2013
It might have been around for what feels like an ice age, but a refrigerator still chilling after almost 85 years could be the oldest in America.The fridge -- which shows no signs of freezing up -- cost around $300 when it was first produced by General Electric, equivalent to a staggering $4,225 today.It is believed to be the oldest working fridge in the US -- a title once belonging to a 1938 flat top GE model owned by Mike Ansel from Pennsylvania.But the three-foot-tall Globe Top monitor top cooler, currently owned by Mark Vail and Jane Galyean from Montgomery, New York, was purchased around eight years earlier....
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
Jul 5, 2013
Look deep into the enormous Lego Acropolis going into the Nicholson Museum tomorrow and you'll see a tiny amphitheatre in which a Lego Oedipus is stabbing his eyes out with a sword. Lego blood spills all over the stage. An audience of Lego mini figures looks on, aghast.''It's a performance of Oedipus Rex,'' explains Michael Turner, the museum's senior curator. ''It's the perfect show for the Theatre of Dionysus and the audience looks like it's having a wild time.''Built by Ryan McNaught, the only Lego-certified professional in the southern hemisphere, the Lego Acropolis contains more than 120,000 bricks and took about 300 hours to build. The buildings, including The Parthenon, the Temple of Athena Nike, the smaller Erechtheion temple and the Propylaia, the monumental gateway, are made from gleaming white bricks....
Source: AFP
Jul 5, 2013
ROME (AFP).- Alarm bells are ringing once more over the upkeep of Italy's historic monuments, from the Roman city of Pompeii to the Colosseum, with budget cuts hampering repairs and UNESCO issuing a stern rebuke."Over the last five years, the culture budget has been reduced by two thirds," Culture Minister Massimo Bray complained in an interview on Monday published in Italian newspapers.Italy is now lagging well behind its European counterparts: the country allocates just 1.1 percent of its budget to culture, compared to 7.4 percent in Ireland, 3.3 percent in Spain and 2.5 percent in France.The lack of funds is having a disastrous affect on the country's archaeological treasures, with many sites closed due to fears of rock collapses and others sporadically shut by protests and strikes....
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jul 5, 2013
An Australian bushman and naturalist claims to have captured video footage of the night parrot, a bird not seen alive for more than a century.John Young, who describes himself as a wildlife detective, showed the footage and a number of still photos of the bird to a packed room of enthusiasts and media at the Queensland Museum on Wednesday. The desert-dwelling night parrot, Pezoporus occidentalis, has never been photographed and the only evidence of its continued existence has been two dead birds found in 1990 and 2006.Wildlife authorities and birders responded to the sighting with excitement, saying the evidence supporting Young's claim was overwhelming....
Source: Reuters
Jul 4, 2013
GETTYSBURG, Pennsylvania (REUTERS) - With 250,000 visitors expected to converge on the Gettysburg battlefields this week, historians and antiquarians say the 150th anniversary of the clash that defined the United States (US) Civil War has prompted an increased interest in Civil War relics - and an apparent uptick in the thefts and faking of conflict memorabilia.While there are no national statistics about thefts of war mementos, museums and law enforcement officers around the nation have reported a range of incidents involving the plundering of Civil War artifacts.The thievery even extended to the current Gettysburg re-enactment, where criminals made off with a trailer containing war items valued at US$10,000 (S$13,000) in Frederick County, Maryland, last month....
Source: NYT
Jul 4, 2013
JOHANNESBURG — The nasty family squabble over where three of former President Nelson Mandela’s children, and eventually the leader himself, will be buried drew to a close on Thursday morning in a small village on the Eastern Cape.But not before it had thrown into relief the perhaps inevitable disputes over the revered leader’s legacy — both the financial legacy, which his family is wrestling over, and more broadly, the political legacy of how Mr. Mandela will be remembered and how his story will guide the country he led.Mandla Mandela, the former president’s eldest grandson and heir as tribal leader in the region, held a news conference in his compound in Mvezo saying that he would cease his legal battles to have the bodies kept there. In 2011, he moved the bodies to Mvezo from another small village, Qunu, where the rest of the Mandela family wanted them and where the anti-apartheid leader is said to wish to be buried himself. By late afternoon, the bodies were reburied in Qunu....
Source: NYT
Jul 4, 2013
LONDON — In the welter of passion and memory surrounding the decline of Nelson Mandela, a more modest commemoration slipped by a week ago that said much about the role he played as an inspiration in his long years of imprisonment, when the daily grind of struggle against apartheid fell to others who fought in his name.It was a reminder, too, that the battle to end white rule was fought on many levels, ranging from the activism of anti-apartheid exiles here in London to a brutal shadow war in South Africa itself that offered no quarter to those seeking a new order.The events of June 27, 1985, offered a particular insight.
Source: AP
Jul 4, 2013
BALTIMORE — The Maryland Historical Society is embarking on a special Independence Day project this year.The society on Thursday began recreating the original Star-Spangled Banner Flag, which flew over Fort McHenry in Baltimore during the War of 1812 and inspired the writing of the national anthem.Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake sewed the first stitch at a July 4 ceremony kicking off the project.The historical society says it expects its authentic reproduction to take six weeks to complete and will involve more than 100 volunteers to help stitch....
Source: CNN.com
Jul 4, 2013
(CNN) – With signs of patriotism abounding for the Fourth of July, a new survey indicates seven in 10 Americans think the Founding Fathers would be disappointed by the way the United States has turned out, 237 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.But that doesn't mean Americans themselves are displeased. The same poll, released Thursday by Gallup, shows the number who say they're very or extremely proud to be American remains steady at 85%....Despite the high level of patriotism, 71% of Americans think the signers of the Declaration of Independence wouldn't be pleased with the nation today. That number has steadily risen since 2001, when the number stood at 42%....
Source: Foreign Policy
Jul 3, 2013
The world has been somewhat surprised by recent reports of the National Security Agency's massive electronic spying operations around the globe. But they're not the only ones with their ears to the proverbial ground. Just about every nation is engaged in some sort of electronic espionage. Russia, for example, still has an array of massive listening stations, ready to snoop on whoever's talking.It's a legacy of the Soviet Union, which ran one of the largest of those electronic eavesdropping networks as it tried to gain any intel it could on the U.S. and its allies. Those old Soviet eavesdropping stations still exist. Some are rusting away in former Soviet countries. Others are still operational.Intelligence historian Matthew Aid just got ahold of a recently declassified CIA document listing the locations of 11 KGB strategic radio interception stations throughout Russia and the rest of the old Soviet Union....
Source: Toronto Star
Jul 3, 2013
They came with kilts and bagpipes, among other Canadian military accoutrements. And now the members of the top-secret World War II unit the Devil's Brigade are leaving with something altogether astonishing -- a Congressional Gold Medal, one of the highest honours the United States can bestow.Canadian Ambassador Gary Doer hailed the news in Washington today after both houses of Congress, in a rare show of bipartisanship, found two-thirds majorities required to grant the medal."We are grateful that the U.S. Congress has recognized the brave accomplishments of the First Special Service Force in World War II," Doer said in a statement."The Devil's Brigade were the first of their kind, and the legacy of bilateral defense cooperation that they inspired continues between our two countries to this day."...
Source: BBC News
Jul 3, 2013
The Queen has officially reopened the former home of author Sir Walter Scott in the Scottish Borders after its multi-million pound restoration.Abbotsford House, near Melrose, will open to the public on Thursday.The royal visitor was given a tour of the house, which shut for major renovations nearly two years ago.The Abbotsford Trust hopes the historic building can become both an "important cultural centre and tourist destination" for the region....
Source: Japan Times
Jul 2, 2013
PHNOM PEL, CAMBODIA – More than 100 burial jars and a dozen coffins arranged on a ledge in remote Cambodian jungle have for centuries held the bones — and secrets — of a mysterious people who lived during the Angkor era.Why the bones were placed in jars on a cliff some 100 meters high in the Cardamom Mountains — or indeed whose remains they are — has long puzzled experts.For seven years Nancy Beavan, an archaeologist who specializes in carbon dating, has been looking for an answer, painstakingly piecing together clues left by the enigmatic people at 10 sites dotted across the area in southwestern Cambodia....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jul 1, 2013
A skull found on the banks of a river in rural Australia is believed to date from the 1600s and has challenged the view that Captain Cook was the first white person to set foot on the country’s east coast.Carbon dating showed the skull belonged to a Caucasian male and had an 80 per cent chance of dating back to the 1600s, long before Captain Cook first reached Australia in 1770.The tests were ordered by local police after the intact skull was found near Taree, a town about 200 miles north of Sydney. No other skeletal remains were found....
Source: Smithsonian Magazine
Jul 1, 2013
High on the facade of Santa Maria Antica, among soaring Gothic spires and forbidding statues of knights in armor, pathologist Gino Fornaciari prepared to examine a corpse. Accompanied by workmen, he had climbed a 30-foot scaffold erected against this medieval church in Verona, Italy, and watched as they used hydraulic jacks to raise the massive lid of a marble sarcophagus set in a niche. Peering inside, Fornaciari found the body of a male in his 30s, wearing a long silk mantle, arms crossed on his chest. The abdomen was distended from postmortem putrefaction, although Fornaciari caught no scent of decomposition, only a faint waft of incense. He and the laborers eased the body onto a stretcher and lowered it to the ground; after dark, they loaded it into a van and drove to a nearby hospital, where Fornaciari began a series of tests to determine why the nobleman died—and how he had lived.
Source: Vanity Fair
Jul 1, 2013
If you saw that blessedly short-lived television series called Pan Am a couple of years ago, you probably think, as I do, that the best thing about it was the Pan Am terminal at J.F.K., a cheerful, round structure with a gigantic overhanging concrete roof that seemed to emerge out of the naïve notion that flying could be fun: airport as midcentury modern circus. The building was certainly more exuberant, not to say more convincing, than any character in the show.
Source: Knoxville News
Jul 1, 2013
The campaign to create a national park dedicated to the once-top-secret Manhattan Project is moving through Congress, but supporters aren’t ready to declare victory just yet.“It is by no means a fait accompli,” says Nancy Tinker, senior field officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.Still it’s the closest the park has come yet to being a done deal.The U.S. House approved in June the $552.1 billion defense authorization bill, which included funds to establish the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, which would include sites in Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, N.M., and Hanford, Wash....
Source: New Zealand Herald
Jul 1, 2013
Today marks the start of the 38th Te Wiki o te Reo Maori (Maori Language Week). It began in 1975 amid concerns about the health of the language and has grown into a week where community groups, companies and schools celebrate with a raft of activities.The Minister of Maori Affairs, Dr Pita Sharples, is calling for more iwi investment in te reo revitalisation and a wider acceptance from Maori that the language still stands in a precarious position.Census data from 2001 to 2006 revealed a drop in ability to hold an everyday conversation in Maori from 25.2 to 23.7 per cent. The figures are the most recent available until this year's figures are released.A new government language strategy is due by the end of the year but officials are already signalling that community initiatives which aim to get Maori speaking their own reo within their homes are an increasing focus....
Source: Bloomberg News
Jun 30, 2013
Croatia became the 28th member of the European Union, capping a decade of judicial and economic overhaul to shed the remnants of communism and its wartime past.Tens of thousands celebrated the entry of the second former Yugoslav republic into the EU with fireworks, five-story projections of its history and technology, concerts, dance performances and street parties across Zagreb. European Commission President Jose Barroso and other EU officials gathered at the central square as Croatian and blue-and-yellow EU flags fluttered in the evening breeze above revelers’ heads.The Adriatic country, which emerged as an independent state in 1991 during the bloody breakup of Yugoslavia, is looking to EU membership to help solidify peace throughout the Balkan region as tensions still smolder in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. Leaders are also counting on EU ties to lure foreign investors to the $63 billion economy and end four years of recession and stagnation....
Source: BBC News
Jun 30, 2013
The 1,300-year-old Lindisfarne Gospels have gone on display in the north-east of England for three months.The major Durham University exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see them outside the British Library in London.An e-book version of the manuscript with "zoomable" digital pictures has been produced by the library.Head of history and classics Dr Scot McKendrick said it "extends the reach and accessibility" of the Gospels and hoped it would be "very inspiring.""It's one of the great frustrations of exhibiting books - we all know there is lots more wonder beyond that one opening that you see," he said....
