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: NBC News
Feb 27, 2013
More than half a century after she refused to give up her seat on an Alabama city bus, Rosa Parks has an immovable place in the U.S. Capitol — the first black woman to be honored with a statue there.President Barack Obama and congressional leaders from both parties said at an unveiling Wednesday that the depiction was fitting: Parks is shown seated, hands clasped in front of her, eyes fixed forward.“Rosa Parks’ singular act of disobedience launched a movement,” Obama said. “The tired feet of those who walked the dusty roads of Montgomery helped a nation see that to which it had once been blind.”...
Source: AP
Feb 27, 2013
President Barack Obama says civil rights icon Rosa Parks has taken her rightful place among those who have shaped the course of U.S. history.Obama and House Speaker John Boehner unveiled a statue of Parks in a ceremony at the Capitol. Parks becomes the first black woman to be honored with a full-length statue in the Capitol's Statuary Hall.A bust of another black woman, abolitionist Sojourner Truth, sits in the Capitol Visitors Center.Obama says the nation learned from Parks that there is always something we can do to improve the future...
Source: Business Week
Feb 27, 2013
The vice president of Germany’s lower house of parliament, Petra Pau, called for a review into the 1933 fire that destroyed the Reichstag in Berlin which helped clear the way for the Nazi rise to power.A communist Dutchman, Marinus van der Lubbe, was sentenced to death for treason and arson in 1933 for setting fire to the parliament building four weeks after Adolf Hitler became chancellor. Historians still debate whether van der Lubbe acted alone or if the Nazis were involved in the crime.“The Reichstag fire is a stigma of German history,” Pau, a member of the Left Party that’s a successor to former East Germany’s ruling communists, said in a speech in Berlin on Feb. 26. “The Bundestag especially should have a particular interest in this and push for a clarification.”...
Source: LiveSci
Feb 26, 2013
Scientists who decode the genetic history of humans by tracking how genes mutate have applied the same technique to one of the Western world's most ancient and celebrated texts to uncover the date it was first written.The text is Homer's "Iliad," and Homer -- if there was such a person -- probably wrote it in 762 B.C., give or take 50 years, the researchers found. The "Iliad" tells the story of the Trojan War -- if there was such a war -- with Greeks battling Trojans....
Source: EUChinaDaily
Feb 26, 2013
A public cemetery uncovered in the city of Xi'an, capital of Northwest China's Shaanxi province, was used for maids of the Tang Dynasty (618 - 907), an archaeologist told Xinhua Tuesday.
A dozen tombs, located in the west of the thousands-year-old city, were found in April, 2012, Liu Daiyun, a Shaanxi Archeology Research Institute researcher said.
Since then, the tombs have been examined....
Source: Cais
Feb 26, 2013
During the second season of archaeological research in western Iran, Iranian archaeologists have discovered the ruins of a Sasanian palatial building.
The ancient building is located in the area called Guri Fortress (Dež-e Gūri) near Zir Tang-e Siyāb of the district of Konāni, 70 kilometres southwest of the city Kūhdasht, in the western Iranian province of Lorestan. The director of the dig is archaeologist Atta Hassanpur.
The discovered structure which is speculated to date to around 600 CE is described as having five interconnected halls, two columned halls and a courtyard....
Source: HisSpeakNews
Feb 26, 2013
A Ministry of Culture team on Tuesday unveiled 11 pre-Inca tombs located inside Peru’s National Sports Village, where excavation work began last December.
The structures are relics of the Lima and Yschma cultures, which flourished during the periods A.D. 200-700 and 1100-1400, respectively.
The director of the project to excavate the Tupac Amaru A and B archaeological sites, Fernando Herrera, in presenting the work done so far said that the importance of the graves is that they were found intact, despite the fact that about 50 percent of the monument was lost during nearby modern construction activities....
Source: BBC News
Feb 26, 2013
More than 50 unpublished poems by Rudyard Kipling have been discovered by a US scholar.Thomas Pinney found the manuscripts in a number of places including a Manhattan House that was being renovated and among the papers of a former head of the Cunard Line.Pinney described it as a "tremendously exciting time for scholars and fans".The poems will be published alongside 1,300 others in the first ever complete edition of Kipling's verse on 7 March...
Source: The Evening Sun
Feb 26, 2013
The long-awaited Abraham Lincoln statue will finally be installed in Gettysburg in April. Rob Lesher, executive drector of the Adams County Library System, announced Tuesday that plans are now firmly in place for the statue's installation. "It will be a very attractive gift to the borough and should be a compelling driver for tourists to visit downtown," Lesher said at a Gettysburg Public Works Committee meeting. The 7-foot-6-inch-tall statue will be placed on the steps of the library on Baltimore Street, but it won't be the only Lincoln statue in downtown Gettysburg. Another statue two blocks away on Lincoln Square also depicts the 16th president, holding his hat and gesturing toward the Wills House where he put the finishing touches on the Gettysburg Address....
Source: Chicago Sun-Times
Feb 26, 2013
...In the wake of Dave McKinney’s stories in the Sun-Times, it has been joy to watch the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield shimmy, trying to escape the obvious conclusion: that no real evidence links the top hat they claim was worn by Lincoln to the 16th president.Yes, it is his size, and yes, it comes from the Springfield hat shop that Lincoln patronized. But to accept that as proof of anything is to believe that every 7 1/8 hat sold in Springfield back then must have belonged to Lincoln. That’s like saying that every sandal from Roman times was worn by Jesus.The library claimed, at first, the hat was given to an Illinois farmer, William Waller, during one of the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates. This ran into a problem when the Sun-Times pointed out a 1958 affidavit that the hat was given to Waller “during the Civil War in Washington.” Now they had two stories, a conflict, like the three churches that each claimed to own a head of John the Baptist....
Source: Religion News Service
Feb 26, 2013
NEW YORK — A new exhibit at New York’s Museum of Biblical Art makes one point clear and inescapable: Biblical narratives and imagery have been an underlining constant in the life of African-American Christians.From the days of slavery onward, “African-Americans felt the Bible was a powerful tool that established their quest for freedom and identity amidst the madness they were living in,” said guest curator Leslie King-Hammond. “The Bible was the constant.”King-Hammond is the founding director of the Center for Race and Culture at the Maryland Institute College of Art and helped organize the exhibit, “Ashe to Amen: African Americans and Biblical Imagery.” (The “ashe” in the exhibition’s title derives from the African Yoruba language and refers to an artist’s power or “inner eye.”)...
Source: WaPo
Feb 26, 2013
...That perception was re-enforced by the surprise presenter of the award, Michelle Obama. Fars News, Iran’s main hardline outlet, wasted no time in questioning her role, writing, “In a rare occasion in Oscar history, the First Lady announced the winner for Best Picture for the anti-Iran Film ‘Argo,’ which is produced by the Zionist company Warner Bros.”...
Source: WaPo
Feb 26, 2013
BEIRUT — Syrian activist Yashar hopes the security agents who tormented him during five months of detention will one day be put on trial. In detention, he says, he was locked naked in a tiny box for a week, beaten daily during marathon interrogations and blindfolded for 45 days.A whole range of groups have accelerated a campaign to gather evidence of war crimes including torture, massacres and indiscriminate killings in the Syrian regime’s war against rebels, hoping to find justice if President Bashar Assad falls. Some talk about referring the cases to the International Criminal Court or forming a special tribunal, but many in Syria hope that it’s all laid out in the country’s own courtrooms.“I want to take my case to a Syrian court and a Syrian judge who will put my torturers in the same jail where I was held,” Yashar, 28, told The Associated Press. He declined to give his full name for security reasons....
Source: Religion News Service
Feb 26, 2013
You won’t find many Catholic churches named after Pope Benedict IX.He was a puppet pope, installed by his powerful family at a time when rival clans ruled Rome. The young man seemed uninterested in religious life, rushing through ordination only after his election to the Throne of St. Peter in 1032.Benedict IX squandered the papacy’s moral and financial riches in bordellos and banquet halls. His violence and debauchery “shocked even the Romans,” said philosopher Bertrand Russell, which is kind of like being busted for lewdness in Las Vegas....
Source: WaPo
Feb 26, 2013
NEW YORK — What could possibly go wrong?An Australian billionaire is getting ready to build a new version of the Titanic that could set sail in late 2016.Clive Palmer unveiled blueprints for the famously doomed ship’s namesake Tuesday at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York. He said construction is scheduled to start soon in China.Palmer said 40,000 people have expressed interest in tickets for the maiden voyage, taking the original course from Southampton, England, to New York. He said people are inspired by his quest to replicate one of the most famous vessels in history....
Source: Washington Times
Feb 26, 2013
The Census Bureau is finally dropping its century-old reference to black Americans as “Negros,” and adopting more modern-day lingo — “black” or “African American.”The change goes into effect next year, The Associated Press reports. That’s when the next American Community Survey is due for distribution to an estimated 3.5 million homes, AP reported.The use of Negro stems from 1900, when it replaced the term “colored,” AP reports. In the 1960s, blacks then began identifying themselves as “blacks,” or “African Americans.” Few nowadays use the term Negro at all, and many find it offensive, said Nicholas Jones, chief of the racial statistics branch at the Census Bureau, according to AP....
Source: NPR
Feb 26, 2013
Beneath a glass coffin, wearing a pontiff's miter and faded vestments of gold and purple, there lies a tiny man with a wax head.This represents an Italian priest who, until this month, was the only pope in history to voluntarily resign.His name is Celestine V.Celestine became pope at 84, some seven centuries ago, after a long and self-punishing career as a hermit.Though a celebrated spiritual leader, and founder of a new branch of the Benedictine order, his papacy lasted just over five months. It's widely viewed as an utter disaster.He left at 85 — the same age as Benedict XVI....
Source: Time Magazine
Feb 25, 2013
“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth,” reads the opening words of the King James bible. According to new research, those words might be considered a slice of creation-angled bread in ametaphorical sandwich — one with a rather morbid filling.Using a free online analytics tool dubbed “Search Visualizer” that transforms text queries into color-coded visual charts, researchers at Keele University in the U.K. and Amridge University in the U.S. have reportedly discovered an ancient literary trick in the Judeo-Christian Bible’s famous foundational book. That trick, known as inclusio or “bracketing,” involves placing similar material at the beginning and end of something; in Genesis’ cases, the writers appear to have enclosed a midsection thematically dominated by “death” with intro and outro passages devoted to “life.”...The researchers call this the “Genesis Death Sandwich,” reports Science Daily. (It’s also not a bad way to draw attention to your research.)...
Source: Nashville Public Radio
Feb 25, 2013
Legislation that would prevent the renaming or moving of war-related monuments in Tennessee passed the state House last night. The bill comes as city officials in Memphis have renamed three Confederate-themed parks.Democrats tried to get the bill’s sponsor – Republican Steve McDaniel – to admit he was responding to the name changes in Memphis, which he denied.Rep. Johnnie Turner asked what if Jews hadn’t been allowed to tear down Nazi statues....
Source: PopuArch
Feb 25, 2013
For years, archaeologists have debated the economic basis for the rise of civilization in the Andean region of Peru. The prevailing theory advanced the notion that the development and consumption of marine resources was the primary mover. Now, however, a team of research scientists have found evidence to dispel that theory....
