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: Daily Mail (UK)
Dec 17, 2012
A photograph taken during a royal visit to Bethlehem to prove the biblical city's existence will be going on display among photographs and diary extracts from a royal tour 150 years ago.Queen Victoria's eldest son King Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, was sent on an educational trip to the Middle East in 1862, accompanied by Francis Bedford - the first photographer on a royal tour.His previously unseen photos include a view of Bethlehem from the roof of the Church of the Nativity, said to be built on the spot where Jesus was born....
Source: WSJ
Dec 17, 2012
We all know the story well: On a cold morning, a troubled man armed with legally purchased guns and a large supply of ammunition walks into a small-town school.He happens upon some of the youngest children in the school, opens fire on them and their teachers, then kills himself. Panicked parents rush to the scene; the nation beyond reacts in horror; two days later, the nation's leader arrives to share in the grief.Newtown, Conn., in 2012? No, Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996.But the parallels between the two massacres are haunting. The victims in the Dunblane school attack were 5- and 6-year-olds, while in Newtown they were 6- and 7-year-olds. Sixteen students died in Dunblane, 20 in Newtown. In both cases, teachers went down with their students. One died in Dunblane; six adults perished at the Newtown school....
Source: AP
Dec 17, 2012
COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley picked U.S. Rep. Tim Scott to be the state’s next U.S. senator Monday, making him the only black Republican in Congress and the South’s first black Republican senator since Reconstruction.Scott, 47, takes over for Jim DeMint, who announced earlier this month he would forgo the remaining four years of this term to lead The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. His resignation takes effect Jan. 1....
Source: WaPo
Dec 17, 2012
Martin Scorsese will produce and direct a documentary on President Bill Clinton for HBO, the pay cable network announced Monday afternoon.The docu is being made with the full cooperation of Clinton, the Time Warner-owned network added.The film will explore the perspectives of the country’s 42nd POTUS on history, politics, culture and the world, the network said, adding that Steve Bing is producing....
Source: WaPo
Dec 17, 2012
DES MOINES, Iowa — A 115-year-old Iowa woman’s granddaughter says the woman has died less than two weeks after inheriting the title of world’s oldest person.Dina Manfredini’s granddaughter Lori Logli says Manfredini died Monday morning. Logli wouldn’t elaborate on her grandmother’s cause of death.Manfredini lived at the Bishop Drumm Retirement Center in Johnston. Guinness World Records confirmed she inherited the title of world’s oldest living person less than two weeks ago. Bessie Cooper of Georgia previously held the title at age 116.Guinness spokesman Robert Young says a Japanese man is believed to now hold the title. Jiroemon Kimura was born on April 19, 1897, which makes him just 15 days younger than Manfredini. Young says Kimura, of Kyotango in Kyoto, also is believed to be the second-oldest man in documented history....
Source: Baltimore Sun
Dec 16, 2012
The DNA of a battle that helped turn the tide of a war going horribly wrong for America lay buried just six inches below the surface in a Kent County cornfield.For nearly two centuries, the musket balls, canister shot and other artifacts from intense fighting at Caulk's Field waited to tell the story of a sweltering August night in 1814, when militiamen sprang a trap on a British raiding party bent on destruction.How did the citizen-soldiers best their battle-tested foes at Caulk's Field?...
Source: NYT
Dec 16, 2012
Since their publication in 1971 the Pentagon Papers have been examined seemingly from every possible historical, political, legal and ethical angle.But to Lisa Gitelman, a professor of English and media studies at New York University, there’s at least one aspect of Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of top-secret Defense Department documents that scholars have failed to consider adequately: the Xerox technology that allowed him to copy them in the first place.Actually, make that “copy and recopy.” In a chapter of her book in progress about the history of documents Ms. Gitelman describes the way Mr. Ellsberg obsessively made copies of his copies, even enlisting the help of his children in what she describes as an act of radical self-publishing....
Source: WaPo
Dec 16, 2012
PYONGYANG, North Korea — North Korea unveiled the embalmed body of Kim Jong Il, still in his trademark khaki jumpsuit, on the anniversary of his death Monday as mourning mixed with pride over a recent satellite launch that was a long-held goal of the late authoritarian leader.Kim lies in state a few floors below his father, national founder Kim Il Sung, in the Kumsusan mausoleum, the cavernous former presidential palace. Kim Jong Il is presented lying beneath a red blanket, a spotlight shining on his face in a room suffused in red.Wails echoed through the chilly hall as a group of North Korean women sobbed into the sashes of their traditional Korean dresses as they bowed before his body. The hall bearing the glass coffin was opened to select visitors — including The Associated Press — for the first time since his death....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 15, 2012
A source with knowledge of the excavation told the Telegraph archaeologists will name the skeleton found beneath a Leicester car park in September as the Plantagenet king even if long-awaited DNA results on the bones prove inconclusive.Additional evidence not revealed at a major press conference after the remains were found demonstrates beyond all reasonable doubt that the body is the King's, even without genetic proof, the source said.Leicester University experts announced earlier this year that there was convincing evidence suggesting the remains were those of Richard III, but have always insisted DNA analysis is needed before a conclusion can be reached....
Source: WaPo
Dec 14, 2012
A Danish architect named Jan Gehl has been hired to create a vision of Moscow 15 years down the road. At a conference here the other day, he waxed enthusiastic about the beautiful possibilities for Europe’s largest city:Traffic cut down to two lanes in each direction. Sidewalks wide enough for strolling, shaded by millions of trees. Trams zipping this way and that, no more dank underground street crossings. With the noble skyline intact, and Tverskaya Street reconfigured as a “fabulous boulevard, the Champs Élysées of the East,” there would be parks along the 104 miles of riverfront (if you count both sides of the river) and a citywide feeling of uplift to inspire residents — an end, in short, to all the Sovietesquerie that weighs so heavily on Moscow today.Oh, and no fewer than 200 neighborhood squares, to create anchors of local identity....
Source: The New Republic
Dec 14, 2012
"As a country, we have been through this too many times," said President Barack Obama on Friday afternoon as he wiped tears from his eyes while addressing the horrific shooting at a Connecticut elementary school. He might have added, "this year." Because it's not your imagination--while mass shootings have terrified and grieved us over the past three decades, this year has been the worst by far. With more than 140 casualties (injuries and deaths), the toll from mass shootings in 2012 has been nearly twice that of any other year....
Source: WSJ
Dec 14, 2012
North Vietnam’s capture of Saigon during the tumultuous days of April 1975 is a pivotal moment in Asia’s post-colonial history, but the story of what happened next is relatively little-known, both in and outside the country. Huy Duc, a veteran Vietnamese journalist, is aiming to shed new light on the reunification of Vietnam and its aftermath in a new book called “The Winning Side.”Now based in Boston, Mass., where he is a Nieman fellow at Harvard University, Mr. Duc spent 20 years working in Vietnam, writing for local newspapers such as Tuoi Tre, Thanh Nien and Saigon Tiep Thi. He also published until 2010 the blogosin.org, which was ranked as the most popular blog in Vietnam, according to his Nieman profile.For the past three years, he has worked on bringing reunification-era Vietnam to life through in-depth interviews with witnesses, including people who went on to become key post-war leaders in Vietnam and shapers of what is now one Asia’s most promising emerging economies....
Source: WaPo
Dec 14, 2012
BERLIN — In a city filled with grand monuments to a tragic past, some here say the tiniest are the most powerful: the thousands of brass-topped cobblestones that are spreading over Berlin’s sidewalks.Six new ones showed up on one street the other day. Five more on another. Each one marks a victim of the Holocaust, placed in front of that person’s home. Together they form an expanding constellation of lives that were lived in this city before it turned against its own.This elegant capital has a grim, concrete-slab memorial covering five acres next to the Brandenburg Gate that is used for official events to commemorate the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust. But now, thousands in Berlin have their own markers, placed there by an artist who has installed similar stones across Europe....
Source: AP
Dec 14, 2012
MILWAUKEE — The vast collection of J.R.R. Tolkien manuscripts initially sold senior Joe Kirchoff on Marquette University, so when the school offered its first course devoted exclusively to the English author, Kirchoff wanted in. The only problem: It was full and he wasn’t on the literature track.Undaunted, the 22-year-old political science and history major lobbied the English department and others starting last spring and through the summer and “kind of just made myself a problem,” he said. His persistence paid off.“It’s a fantastic course,” said Kirchoff, a Chicago native. “It’s a great way to look at something that’s such a creative work of genius in such a way you really come to understand the man behind it.”...
Source: AP
Dec 14, 2012
WASHINGTON — President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington for Civil Rights were 100 years apart, but both changed the nation and expanded freedoms.Beginning Friday, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture is presenting a walk back in time through two eras. A new exhibit, “Changing America,” parallels the 1863 emancipation of slaves with the 1963 March on Washington.An inkwell Lincoln used to draft what would become the Emancipation Proclamation is on display on one side of the timeline, while the pen President Lyndon Johnson used to sign the Civil Rights Act is on the other....
Source: NYT
Dec 14, 2012
Reviving a 20-year debate over illnesses of veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf war, a new scientific paper presents evidence that nerve agents released by the bombing of Iraqi chemical weapons depots just before the ground war began could have carried downwind and fallen on American troops staged in Saudi Arabia.The paper, published in the journal Neuroepidemiology, tries to rebut the longstanding Pentagon position, supported by many scientists, that neurotoxins, particularly sarin gas, could not have carried far enough to sicken American forces.The authors are James J. Tuite and Dr. Robert Haley, who has written several papers asserting links between chemical exposures and gulf war illnesses. They assembled data from meteorological and intelligence reports to support their thesis that American bombs were powerful enough to propel sarin from depots in Muthanna and Falluja high into the atmosphere, where winds whisked it hundreds of miles south to the Saudi border....
Source: NYT
Dec 14, 2012
The illegal immigrants had crossed the river in defiance of the law, then escaped capture by sneaking past armed patrols in the dark. They did not have the required paperwork and were ordered to leave, but the authorities suspected the immigrants would probably defy them.It is a scenario that happens every day on the Texas-Mexico border. But in this particular incident, the immigrants were white, English-speaking Americans who were looking for a better life in Texas. And the authorities who were trying to keep them out were Mexican.The episode offers some modern lessons, according to one Texas official.In 1830, Mexico passed a law banning almost all immigration from the United States and provided for military garrisons along its border to enforce it....
Source: thegrio
Dec 14, 2012
This month, HBO premieres The Loving Story, a documentary film that chronicles the lives of Richard and Mildred Loving, the plaintiffs in a 1967 Supreme Court case that challenged Virginia's ban on interracial marriage.
Source: NYT
Dec 13, 2012
“Lincoln” received the most Globe nominations on Thursday, picking up seven. But this Hollywood awards show typically likes to spread its love around — perhaps because that makes for a livelier red-carpet spectacle — so “Argo” and “Django Unchained” were close behind with five nominations apiece. “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Les Misérables” and “Silver Linings Playbook” each received four.Related Links HNN Hot Topics: "Lincoln": The Movie
Source: WaPo
Dec 13, 2012
COPENHAGEN, Denmark — For years, the somber fairy tale about a lonely candle that wanted to be lit dwelt in oblivion at the bottom of a box in Denmark’s National Archives. Its recent discovery has sent ripples through the literary world because it is believed to be one of the first tales ever written by Hans Christian Andersen.The famed Dane wrote nearly 160 fairy tales in his life, including classics such as “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Little Mermaid.” The tale of the candle may have been written when he was still a teen, experts say.Retired historian Esben Brage said Thursday that he found the six-page text on Oct. 4 while searching through archive boxes that had belonged to wealthy families from Andersen’s hometown of Odense in central Denmark....
