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: WaPo
Dec 13, 2012
Beyond the unifying symmetry of the numbers, what binds and animates the new “Changing America: The Emancipation Proclamation, 1863, and the March on Washington, 1963” exhibit at the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture gallery is the great press of American people toward freedom.It is a constant, relentless force before, during and after these iconic moments in history, with a sweep that is nationally momentous and deeply personal. It winds between the artifacts, giving them weight and suasion.The gallery, inside the American History Museum, divides into two sides and organizes around a quote from labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph: “Freedom is never given, it is won.”...
Source: NYT
Dec 13, 2012
LONDON — New testimony that emerged Thursday deepened the intrigue surrounding the death of the former K.G.B. officer Alexander V. Litvinenko, offering “prima facie” evidence of Russian state involvement and indicating that he had been a paid agent of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, lawyers at a preliminary inquest hearing said.The accusations evoked the murky world of rumor, claim and counterclaim in which Mr. Litvinenko appeared to operate before his death in November 2006 and raised questions about his role in the twilight arena of competing intelligence services.Mr. Litvinenko died after ingesting a rare and highly toxic radioactive isotope, polonium 210, which British investigators later traced to a pot of tea served to him at an upscale hotel in Grosvenor Square, opposite the American Embassy in central London. British prosecutors have charged another former K.G.B. operative, Andrei K. Lugovoi, with the killing. Mr. Lugovoi has denied the charge....
Source: Discovery News
Dec 13, 2012
Imagine peeking into an old garden shed and discovering the oldest woodworking shop in United States. It's a kind of traditional woodworker's dream. This is basically what happened to a University of Delaware professor recently."The first time I saw it, I about fell over,” said Ritchie Garrison, professor of history professor and director of the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware. "It was a bit like walking into the past."The discovery was entirely accidental. Garrison and Michael Burrey were in the process of revamping Garrison's 19th century house in Plymouth, Mass. Burrey was also working on a project at a local preschool in Duxbury, Mass., where he discovered what turns out to be a 18th century joiner's shop. Garrison invited several experts in material culture got to see the shop for themselves....
Source: NYT
Dec 13, 2012
BANGKOK — For decades Douglas A. J. Latchford, an 81-year-old British art collector, has built a reputation as one of the world’s great experts in Khmer antiquities, one whose generous return of treasures to Cambodia garnered him knighthood there in 2008.But last month Mr. Latchford, who lives here in an apartment brimming with Asian artifacts, was depicted less chivalrously in a civil complaint filed by the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan.The federal lawyers said Mr. Latchford, identified in court papers only as “the Collector,” bought a 10th-century Khmer warrior statue in the early 1970s knowing that it had been looted from a jungle temple during the Cambodian civil war....
Source: NYT
Dec 13, 2012
LONDON — Nearly a quarter of a century after one of the most brazen killings in Northern Ireland’s decades of sectarian violence, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said Wednesday that there had been “a shocking level of state collusion” and offered an apology to the family of the slain man.
Source: NYT
Dec 13, 2012
MOSCOW — In his first major speech since returning to the presidency, Vladimir V. Putin on Wednesday called on Russians “not to lose ourselves as a nation,” urging them to look for guidance in Russia’s historic and traditional values — and not in Western political models — as it charts its post-Soviet development.Mr. Putin also sent tough messages to officials in his government, warning that their spending will now be monitored and that the prosecutor’s office had been empowered to seize illegally acquired assets. He recommended barring officials and other political figures from holding stocks and bank accounts outside Russia and said the government would begin to closely scrutinize officials’ foreign real estate holdings.
Source: NYT
Dec 13, 2012
WASHINGTON — Even before its official release, “Zero Dark Thirty,” the new movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, has become a national Rorschach test on the divisive subject of torture.The film’s unflinching portrayal of the Central Intelligence Agency’s brutal interrogation of Al Qaeda prisoners hews close to the official record, offering a gruesome sampling of methods like the near-drowning of waterboarding.
Source: WaPo
Dec 13, 2012
Afghanistan’s history since 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded to prop up a sympathetic government, has been dark and often violent....But, before all that, the country was a remote and poor but not-so-bad place. Attesting to the pre-1979 Afghanistan and how much it has changed is this excerpt from a 1970s Lonely Planet travel book, which described the country as “vastly appealing.” The country’s biggest problems at the time, according to the excerpt unearthed by a Reddit user, were slow travel, “aloof” locals, and “banditry....
Source: WaPo
Dec 13, 2012
BLOEMFONTEIN, South Africa — South African President Jacob Zuma on Thursday honored anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela, who has been hospitalized since the weekend to recover from a lung infection.Zuma unveiled a statue of Mandela in the city of Bloemfontein, also called Mangaung, which next week hosts the ruling African National Congress party’s convention.“We will be able to yet again pay tribute to a man who became a symbol of both our struggle for freedom and the free and democratic South Africa,” Zuma said.Mandela, 94, was admitted on Saturday to 1 Military Hospital in Pretoria, the capital....
Source: WSJ
Dec 12, 2012
Researchers on Wednesday said they found the earliest known chemical evidence of cheese-making, based on the analysis of milk-fat residues in pottery dating back about 7,200 years. The discovery suggests Europe's early farmers added a cheese course to their diet almost as soon as they learned to domesticate cattle and started regularly milking cows.Scientists led by geochemist Richard Evershed at the U.K.'s University of Bristol tested ancient, perforated clay pots excavated at sites along the Vistula River in Poland, and found they had likely been used by prehistoric cheese mongers as strainers to separate curds and whey—a critical step in making cheese.The pots have long puzzled archeologists, but their new analysis, reported in Nature, revealed unique carbon isotopes of milk in the traces of fatty acids that had soaked into the ceramic sieves....
Source: WaPo
Dec 12, 2012
LONDON — It was an archaeological hoax that fooled scientists for decades. A century on, researchers are determined to find out who was responsible for Piltdown Man, the missing link that never was.In December 1912, it was announced that a lawyer and amateur archaeologist named Charles Dawson had made an astonishing discovery in a gravel pit in southern England — prehistoric remains, up to 1 million years old, that combined the skull of a human and the jaw of an ape....It was 40 years before the find was definitively exposed as a hoax, and speculation about who did it rages to this day. Now scientists at London’s Natural History Museum — whose predecessors trumpeted the Piltdown find and may be suspects in the fraud— are marking the 100th anniversary with a new push to settle the argument for good....
Source: Fox News
Dec 12, 2012
First he found the Titanic -- will he find the only ship more famous?Robert Ballard, the underwater archaeologist famed for discovering the wreck of the Titanic in 1985, claims to have found evidence of the biblical flood that Noah fled, surfing the waters for 40 days and 40 nights, according to Genesis. He says the Black Sea was once merely a freshwater lake -- until an enormous wall of water from the Mediterranean 200 times more powerful than Niagara Falls swept it and everything else away. Including Noah and his ark."We went in there to look for the flood," Ballard told ABC News. "Not just a slow moving, advancing rise of sea level, but a really big flood that then stayed ... the land that went under stayed under."
Source: WSJ
Dec 11, 2012
Careful who you call primitive: cave dwellers, it now emerges, were better at drawing animals than many of their highly trainer latter-day successors.Hungarian researchers analyzed 1,000 images of four-legged animals and found the surprising result that the cave artists were far more accurate at portraying the animals’ much-misunderstood gait. Before the work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who published his classic “Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements” in 1887, modern-era artists got the gait wrong a remarkable 83.5% of the time, the scientists found. Post-Muybridge, the error rate fell to 58%....
Source: Discovery News
Dec 11, 2012
A large labyrinth lies in the midst of Peru's Nazca Lines, according to the most detailed study on the enigmatic desert etchings created between 2,100 and 1,300 years ago.Completely hidden in the flat and featureless landscape, the labyrinth was identified after a five-year investigation into the arid Peruvian coastal plain land, about 250 miles south of Lima, where the mysterious geoglyphs are located."As you walk it, only the path stretching ahead of you is visible at any given point," Clive Ruggles of the University of Leicester's School of Archaeology and Ancient History, said....
Source: WaPo
Dec 11, 2012
If you’re reading this and run into Albert Small’s wife, hide the newspaper. Mum’s the word, okay?The local real estate developer just bought a letter written by George Washington for $290,000 — but he hasn’t mentioned the purchase to Shirley, his spouse of more than 60 years.“I don’t tell my wife these things,” he told us Monday. “She doesn’t like to hear about it.”...
Source: WaPo
Dec 11, 2012
NEW YORK — Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal were knee-deep in preparing the follow-up to their Oscar-winning “The Hurt Locker,” a film that would chronicle the manhunt for Osama bin Laden, his escape in Tora Bora and the vanishing trail of the world’s most wanted man.“Then history changed,” says Bigelow.After a team of Navy SEALs killed bin Laden in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2 last year, the director Bigelow and Boal, a journalist turned screenwriter, set about remaking their film. Whereas most films start with a concept or a dramatic arc, Boal and Bigelow built “Zero Dark Thirty” one source at a time, piecing together a narrative out of recent history shrouded in secrecy.The approach — a marriage of Boal’s reporting and Bigelow’s visceral action — has made “Zero Dark Thirty” a lightning rod. Though Sony’s Columbia Pictures won’t release it until Dec. 19 in New York and Los Angeles with a national release to follow on Jan. 11, it has already been hailed as the best film of the year, spawned a Pentagon investigation and elicited op-eds that say the film exaggerates the efficacy of torture....
Source: WaPo
Dec 11, 2012
The government has decided to remove a controversial inscription on the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial rather than replace it, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Tuesday....The inscription comes from a powerful, difficult-to-distill sermon King delivered two months before he was assassinated in 1968.Speaking to the congregation of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, King critiqued the “drum major instinct,” shorthand for a showboat who leads the parade. Imagining his own eulogy, King made it clear he wanted to be remembered for a higher purpose.“Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice,” King said. “Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all the other shallow things will not matter.”When carved into granite on the north face of the memorial’s centerpiece, a statue of King emerging from a huge block of stone, the sentiment was edited from 46 words to 10, to fit the space available: “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness.”...
Source: EADT 24 (UK)
Dec 10, 2012
A HISTORIAN has made what he described as an “exciting” discovery when he investigated musical notes carved in stone at a building in Bury St Edmunds.Rob Lansman believes the Market Cross building in the town centre probably reveals the oldest ‘written in stone’ musical notation of the British national anthem.While researching his new book on public art in the town, he took a closer look at one of four panels, or reliefs, which shows the horned Greek god Pan with what looked like a page of sheet music....
Source: WaPo
Dec 10, 2012
TOKYO — At a Shinto shrine here lined with cherry trees, a war museum asserts a jarring and unrepentant storyline about Japan’s wartime past, brushing aside well-documented atrocities and describing its rampage through Asia as tragic but justified.The museum, making its case with videos and wall displays, says Japan “advanced through” Asia between 1931 and 1945 to protect neighboring countries from Western colonialism. There is no mention that the Imperial Army forced women into front-line brothels, or that its soldiers ransacked cities, using civilians for bayonet practice.The Yasukuni Shrine is a religious site, not a national one, and some Japanese visit simply to honor the war dead. But Yasukuni and its adjacent museum remain the symbolic heart of World War II militarism, when Shinto was the state-sponsored religion and an emperor-worshiping army tried to take control of Asia.
Source: Yahoo News
Dec 10, 2012
A bundle of recent genetic studies have suggested modern humans had sex with Neanderthals thousands of years ago when the two populations roamed the planet alongside each other. However, the bones left behind by the two species don't bear any obvious traces of interbreeding, and a new study of monkeys in Mexico shows why we shouldn't expect them to.Researchers examined blood samples, hair samples and measurements collected from mantled howler monkeys and black howler monkeys that were live-captured and released in Mexico and Guatemala between 1998 and 2008. The two monkey species splintered off from a common ancestor about 3 million years ago; today they live in mostly separate habitats, except for a "hybrid zone" in the state of Tabasco in southeastern Mexico, where they coexist and interbreed.
